We were woken up early to heated shouts, looked out of the third-floor hotel window, and saw a line-up of some thirty or forty bakers, dressed in regulation white overalls and caps, standing to attention like floury soldiers as their sergeant major stalked up and down the line shouting at them. This is the Chinese version of staff motivation. On seeing the bright blue sapphire sky shining eagerly above the black buildings, Clive and I were imbued with enough motivation to shower, get dressed and get out of the hotel in half an hour.
Near the bus station we met two men wearing cheap leather jackets and sunglasses, who pointed to their dusty red motorbikes. We bargained and got a price of fifteen Yuan to take us to the Yungang Grottoes. It wasn’t exactly Easy Rider, but the journey across the flat floodplains, along yellow roads, on the bouncy pillions of those little bikes was exhilarating nonetheless. Windswept, with dirt in our eyes and ears, hair sticking up everywhere, we clambered off at the entrance to the grottoes. The two men adjusted their sunglasses and roared off into the shimmering dust. Ahead and above us, the mountain ridges were outlined starkly by the bright blue sky in cinematic superimposition.
The Yungang Grottoes were carved out of and into the high sandstone mountains around 400 BC, the first of the Buddhist revival period and, it is held, the best. They are a series of fifty caves, each with different sitting Buddha figures and high pillars and walls of tiny intricate Bodhisattvas, used as cave-temples by the colony of monks here long ago. The detail and scale of the carvings are astonishing: giant sitting Buddhas, with feet bigger than busses, huge hands held out invitingly on which you could sit a whole coach party of tourists, wide noses and giant smiles, set against the smaller, repetitive decorative carvings in the cave walls, which are like a kind of holy wallpaper, some of which still retain patches of green, red and gold colour. However, the caves were as busy as they were breathtaking. You had to queue before getting a glimpse at each grotto, shuffling and pushing on the dusty paths, as the huge mysterious Buddhas watched the crowds unconcernedly. Perhaps they knew they’d be here for a lot longer than us transitory camera snappers with our peculiar forms of worship.
After we'd seen all we could of the grottoes, Clive and I walked around the corner of a sandstone cliff and were confronted, directly across the road, by a huge coalmine. The mine lay spread-eagled in a series of filthy huts, warehouses, and factories, ugly and black like a stain on the yellow land, huge smokestacks belching smudgy brown pollution into the innocent blue sky. Victorian-style wheel and pulley systems transported the coal from pit-faces to trucks. The trucks then fired their dust-addled engines and chugged off down the sandy roads, spewing black exhaust smoke behind them. The noise of machinery, engines, explosions and shouting men split the pristine sky. Miners, black and thin in the distance, trooped back and forth like rows of Lowrie stick-men. I pondered yet another incongruity in this dry, dirty region: a coal mine built behind the back of a smiling Buddha.
We hitched a lift to the Hanging Temple on a bus from Hangzhou, full of students and teachers from the Television University. At least, that's what they called it. Perhaps they meant it was a university for media studies, or perhaps for drama and the performing arts. Or maybe it really was a university dedicated to training young Chinese for acting in the two kinds of popular soap operas in the country: either tacky, predictable romances (the man always tall, quiet and deep, never showing his feelings, and the girlfriend hysterical, with a penchant for bursting into uncontrollable tears and screams in every episode), or gong-fu stories, set in ancient times (the men either porcine and comical, bearded and nasty, or long-haired and handsome, the girls either an evil queen, a cute and cheeky sister or a stunning damsel who always needs rescuing).
Our coach inched ever-slower round treacherous turns with sheer drops plummeting below, onwards and upwards so slowly, into the spectacular peaks of Shanxi province's Heng Shan mountain range, the floodplains stretching like an endless yellow sea into the distance, the yellow mountains, with their wind-blasted, rain-warped, sandstone rock formations slowly crowding around us. Tiny mountain villages huddle in the nooks and crannies of the rock, mud huts with small areas of irrigated field that looked dried-up and fruitless. Some of the villages consist of cave-houses hollowed out of the mountainsides, rough little oblong windows and doorways winking from the side of the cliffs. It must be a tough, thirsty, physical life of hardship this high up in a cave-house with no running water or electricity, and I didn’t envy the villagers’ life here.
The day warmed like a turned-up oven, the sun beating down on the shining metal of the unsheltered coaches, which smoked and struggled up the slopes like an army of giant mechanical ants. Our bus ground to a halt, engine steaming. Feeling traitorous, we left our TV friends and tried to hitch a lift with one of the passing line of busses, but none of them would stop. Perhaps they didn't want to stop on this steep mountainside, just in case they never got started again. The TV coach's engine roared back to life and, shamefaced, we jumped on again to insulted looks. Half an hour later, we eventually reached the Xuan Kong Si, or Hanging Temple.
There has apparently been a temple on this site (a sheer, unforgiving cliff face of sandstone rock) since the Northern Wei dynasty, which makes the site more than 1,400 years old. In heavy rain, the Heng river, which used to flow right alongside the original temple, would burst its banks and wash away the temple with it. So, the monks came up with the ingenious (or crazy?) idea of building the temple higher and higher up the mountain face, holding the foundations of the temple steady on high stilts above the water. Every time the floods washed away the temple, they’d build it again, only higher up. The cycle of destruction and rebuilding ended when the Heng river was dammed off, leaving the temple literally hanging hundreds of feet up the rock wall above a dry bed of pebbles. Its name in Chinese, which translates as Temple Suspended over the Void, seems appropriate.
The temples are a chain of two- and three-story pagoda complexes with the sandstone face of the mountain as their back wall and a frontage of ornate carved wood, painted in reds and greens, hanging grandly, surreally, from the mountain. I'd love to be able to describe the insides of the temples, but we didn't go into them. As we approached the entrance, marvelling at the precarious beauty of this feat of holy engineering, we were confronted by a huge crowd of people. The Hanging Temple just wasn’t designed for this volume of visitors. Once you've queued in cordoned-off lines to buy your ticket, you’re let out into a wide open space, with no guards or ushers demanding you stand in line and wait; therefore, a couple of hundred tourists, penned into this space, were surging and pushing against each other like a football crowd after a goal to get to the entrance first. We saw that to get up to the temple, you needed to pass through a gate then ascend steps no wider than two or three persons abreast. The Chinese people, with their inability to queue politely, were clustered around this bottleneck. At least two hundred people were trying to squeeze all at once into a gap for two.
It was horrendous. I’ve never seen anything like it. There was only one guard at the gate, and I thought he was about to get over-run. He screamed nervously at the crowd through his loudhailer. Another large surge began as even more people were allowed into the pen, but not enough people had either left or entered the temple to make room for them. People behind unintentionally pushed those in front, who turned around in anger and started pushing back, throwing punches, arguing and grappling. Little children were getting crushed against the legs of adults and crying shrilly. Men were fighting each other around the bottleneck entrance. Tourists coming back down from the temple couldn’t get out for the mass of people below them. It was an absolute shambles. Ridiculous. Dangerous. Nick and I, slightly shaken by these scenes, walked in the opposite direction up the mountain path to the viaduct. Heng Shan mountain presides over a reservoir of still blue water, which sparkled serenely in the spring sunshine. Swifts and martins swooped and played over the water, chasing insects. It was amazingly quiet and calm. Yet only a few hundred feet below us, people were jammed in tight together, screaming, pushing and fighting.
Today I saw how the internal tourism of China is destroying every place of historical heritage or natural beauty it purports to protect. More and more people in China are now making enough money to have a holiday yet, as the holidays are controlled by the government, everyone travels at the same time. Also, not many holidaymakers are allowed a visa to travel out of the country, so everyone heads for the same places. They do not have a choice of France, Spain or the Canaries, Peru or Hawaii, Sydney or Delhi. They have a choice of Tai Shan and the Hanging Temple, or Dali and Lijiang, or Guilin and Yangshuo, and therefore descend on these beautiful little places in huge numbers, leaving destruction in their wake. And it's not even fun! The pushing and shoving endemic in Chinese culture is intensified by the sheer mass of people, so that you have to fight for every bus, hotel and photo opportunity you can get. Countries such as Brazil, Peru or Thailand have complained that the new force of colonial destruction endangering their culture and environment is that of tourism. 'We' go to these countries, stay in nice hotels, visit safari parks, climb mountains, but don't realise the destruction and the draining of natural resources the tourist industry masks. Sure, we bring money to the local economies, but in an industry which is long-term unsustainable. China, however, is managing just fine to destroy its cultural heritage and scenic spots all by itself. Perfectly happily, in fact, as its making money out of it. Is that the difference between an under-developed and developing country, that the developing country is much more capable of ruining its environment without outside help?
Monday, December 29, 2008
Datong
The five-hour bus journey from Tai Yuan to Datong, through sprawling arid mountains and across flat yellow floodplains, proved to be more spectacular, but no less diverting, than our destination. Datong was once an ancient city of some renown. A glazed screen of nine beautifully depicted dragons, which used to be the frontage of an imperial palace, still remains like a single soldier flying the flag of a fallen company. There are a few old temples and, in the centre of the city, an impressive, well-preserved Drum Tower. Now, however, all about you, filthy black buildings crumble and fall, some through old age and neglect, some through the unstoppable will to progress of developing construction-crazy China. Datong is one dirty, smelly, derelict building site. At night, off the main drag, there are no streetlights and no pavements. Instead, you walk up and down huge piles and mounds of broken earth and concrete in the dark, sometimes a drop of six or ten feet behind the ascent awaiting the oblivious pedestrian like a bear-trap. The dirt streets are flanked by squatting men and women, who display their wares of screws, nuts, bolts, engine parts, shampoo, face cream, hairbrushes, on dirty sheets or rugs. They call out to you in Chinese as you pass, Spark plug? Wanna buy a spark plug? Or, Nuts and bolts! Nuts and bolts for sale here! (At least, I presume that was what they were saying.) And yet despite the crumbling chaos, it’s a huge city, developing, destroying, rebuilding, regenerating, regurgitating. Tai Yuan now seems positively modern, Harbin a gilded metropolis.
Late afternoon, from the top of the Drum Tower, Clive and I watched a department store on the main street stage a fashion show of wedding dresses. The girls were stunning, although totally depressed. Despite the sunshine, the temperature was chilly, and these delectable young girls had to walk out, strutting and pouting, to the high-pitched refrain of Chinese pop songs, in skimpy white, peach, pink or purple dresses, pose alluringly, then leave the stage, to hoots and whistles from the huge crowd of dirty workers and scruffy young families gathered around the raised stage. The incongruity of it, the majority of the onlookers surely unable to afford these skimpy yet extortionate dresses, the girls, certainly not from rich families themselves, or they wouldn't have had to do this, being ridiculed by them, the attempt at glamour, sophistication, sexiness, in this run-down, beat-up mining town, the miners, workers and housewives, beset by conflicting feelings of jealousy and glitter, wanting more but hating every minute of it. Throughout this weird sideshow, all around for miles the city of Datong lay before us, crumbled, broken, rows of tumbled down, windowless shacks interspersed with huge concrete blocks covered in soot.
Tonight we ate sushi in a wonderful restaurant called the Yonghe Dajiudian, which is credited as being the best restaurant in the province. It stands like a neon beacon amidst the broken pavements and run-down streets. We were given warm facecloths to wipe our grimy hands, china cups filled with delicious green tea, well-presented dishes brought by the polite pretty serving staff. The floors and tables were shining and pristine, the tablecloths a sparkling white, the wine glasses polished to a perfect shine. We ate and drank like kings for an hour and a half, without even having to refill our glasses. As I sat back in my mahogany chair, sated and tired, I looked out of the window and saw a little boy, only six or seven years old, standing alone on a huge pile of beaten earth and stone in the middle of the dug-up road, silhouetted darkly against the dusk, brandishing a long stick like a tiny warrior celebrating some kind of hollow victory. As the sushi turned in my stomach, guilt, horror and sadness combining to pin me to my comfortable chair, the little soldier waved his stick and conquered his imaginary world from the summit of his huge mound of muck.
Late afternoon, from the top of the Drum Tower, Clive and I watched a department store on the main street stage a fashion show of wedding dresses. The girls were stunning, although totally depressed. Despite the sunshine, the temperature was chilly, and these delectable young girls had to walk out, strutting and pouting, to the high-pitched refrain of Chinese pop songs, in skimpy white, peach, pink or purple dresses, pose alluringly, then leave the stage, to hoots and whistles from the huge crowd of dirty workers and scruffy young families gathered around the raised stage. The incongruity of it, the majority of the onlookers surely unable to afford these skimpy yet extortionate dresses, the girls, certainly not from rich families themselves, or they wouldn't have had to do this, being ridiculed by them, the attempt at glamour, sophistication, sexiness, in this run-down, beat-up mining town, the miners, workers and housewives, beset by conflicting feelings of jealousy and glitter, wanting more but hating every minute of it. Throughout this weird sideshow, all around for miles the city of Datong lay before us, crumbled, broken, rows of tumbled down, windowless shacks interspersed with huge concrete blocks covered in soot.
Tonight we ate sushi in a wonderful restaurant called the Yonghe Dajiudian, which is credited as being the best restaurant in the province. It stands like a neon beacon amidst the broken pavements and run-down streets. We were given warm facecloths to wipe our grimy hands, china cups filled with delicious green tea, well-presented dishes brought by the polite pretty serving staff. The floors and tables were shining and pristine, the tablecloths a sparkling white, the wine glasses polished to a perfect shine. We ate and drank like kings for an hour and a half, without even having to refill our glasses. As I sat back in my mahogany chair, sated and tired, I looked out of the window and saw a little boy, only six or seven years old, standing alone on a huge pile of beaten earth and stone in the middle of the dug-up road, silhouetted darkly against the dusk, brandishing a long stick like a tiny warrior celebrating some kind of hollow victory. As the sushi turned in my stomach, guilt, horror and sadness combining to pin me to my comfortable chair, the little soldier waved his stick and conquered his imaginary world from the summit of his huge mound of muck.
Pingyao, A One Hundred Year Old Egg and Monks with Rolexes
01/05/02
Today we found ourselves on a seventeen-seater bus with twenty-five other people, the driver a madman, the conductor a psychopath with scary insect eyes. I was seated alongside a fat man in green camouflage jacket who farted continuously throughout the journey until the crowded bus smelt like a one hundred year old egg. This was the bus ride to the fortified town of Pingyao.
The original reason for this little town's existence was money: it was home to the first bank in China. The reason for its existence now is exactly the same, money, although this time the business is tourism. The surrounding wall was begun in 827 BC. The wall was to keep raiding bandits away from the money-pots, and for a long time Pingyao was such an economic centre of importance, it was nicknamed 'Little Beijing'. Now, the town is protected by UNESCO, and is considered an important historical site of cultural heritage. One wonders if the fortified wall during ancient times hadn't proved more efficacious than the town's modern form of UNESCO protection, as being an important cultural heritage site now means that the raiders are not violent tribes on horseback, but armies of tourists flooding out from coaches and storming through the gates.
Today is Labour Day, the first day of the weeklong May national holiday. The narrow streets of Pingyao are heaving with people, shopping, taking photos, pushing, shoving, laughing and spitting, tour guides whistling and clapping their hands, coach upon coach pulling up outside the main gates in a haze of exhaust fumes to spew out their unruly load. The attractive, authentic Han dynasty buildings, with their intersecting inner courtyards, well-kept wooden decorative latticework and carvings, separated by rough cobbled streets, are subjected to a rampage of looting and pillaging quite unlike anything that had once endangered it in the past. You could almost hear the small town creaking under the weight of it, just one more coach load perhaps being the final straw, whereupon the town would collapse, implode, descend into the pits of pandemonium, brought down by its own helpless greed. Once such a beautiful, authentic and ancient place has been officially declared beautiful, authentic and ancient, it's the signal for its surrender.
The surreal thing is, the workers just keep on working. Apart from the population of the town who are actually involved in the tourist trade, every other person just goes about their daily business, cooking, hanging out washing, fixing bicycles, as crowds of mad tour groups fall over each other to take pictures of them. Tourists creep down narrow alleyways for a quick peek, stare into doorways and windows, explore private courtyards, and even go into people’s houses, thinking them exhibits when they're really just homes. At one stage, trying to escape the madding crowd, Clive and I found ourselves in the middle of a wedding party in a secluded courtyard, feeling like skeletons at the feast. Instead of inviting us to join them, the people quite rightly looked daggers at us until we slunk away. It must be strange to live, work, love and die in this place, under the careless scrutiny of absolute strangers. It reminded me of Luss, the small village where they shoot the popular soap opera Take the High Road, in Scotland. When filming is not in progress, tour groups from America, Canada, England, everywhere, are shown round this quaint little Scottish village while the residents, not actors but real people who happen to live there, just carry on regardless as if it's perfectly normal to be ogled at by a bus-load of Australian grannies while you're chopping carrots.
Perhaps because each tour group has only a limited amount of time, allotted to them by their commander-in-chief, the guide, not many of them had managed to scale the fortified walls, so that’s where Nick and I headed. We met an old man up top who hired out bicycles and we cycled round the perimeter of the ancient town. It took us only about an hour, but the tranquility, the fresher air, and most of all the stunning views of Pingyao below us, huddled ancient rooftops like sheep clustered in a pen during a storm, set against the immense dusty yellow flatlands, with mountains looming to all sides in the distance like protective shepherds, proved to be the best part of the day. The wall itself is ten metres high and constructed in the shape of a rough square. It has 72 watchtowers (to represent the 72 sages of China), and 3,000 parapets (standing for the disciples of Confucius). Below you the town lies in higgledy-piggledy criss-cross fashion, and you can see people on the flat rooftop gardens feeding livestock, washing vegetables, throwing sticks to dogs, cleaning machinery. When they look up and catch your eye, you’re left with a choice: hang your head in shame and shuffle off, or brazenly take a photo like a true, unabashed voyeur.
We arrived back at the Railway Hotel in Tai Yuan to find it taken over by a convention of maroon-cassocked monks, each looking identical with their shaven heads, shiny fake Rolex watches and white sports shoes, some of them Reebok, Mizuno or Nike. A monk with a Rolex watch? Weren't they meant to reject materialism and devote their time to inner contemplation? And wasn't a watch pointless anyway, as the monk should surely believe time immeasurable, as he would be reincarnated again and again into eternity, thus time becomes negated, their very idea of it infinite and circular? Maybe he needed a watch so he didn't miss his train when going on holiday. But, aren't holidays in themselves just a materialist construct, and a deviation from the contemplation of... whatever.
Today we found ourselves on a seventeen-seater bus with twenty-five other people, the driver a madman, the conductor a psychopath with scary insect eyes. I was seated alongside a fat man in green camouflage jacket who farted continuously throughout the journey until the crowded bus smelt like a one hundred year old egg. This was the bus ride to the fortified town of Pingyao.
The original reason for this little town's existence was money: it was home to the first bank in China. The reason for its existence now is exactly the same, money, although this time the business is tourism. The surrounding wall was begun in 827 BC. The wall was to keep raiding bandits away from the money-pots, and for a long time Pingyao was such an economic centre of importance, it was nicknamed 'Little Beijing'. Now, the town is protected by UNESCO, and is considered an important historical site of cultural heritage. One wonders if the fortified wall during ancient times hadn't proved more efficacious than the town's modern form of UNESCO protection, as being an important cultural heritage site now means that the raiders are not violent tribes on horseback, but armies of tourists flooding out from coaches and storming through the gates.
Today is Labour Day, the first day of the weeklong May national holiday. The narrow streets of Pingyao are heaving with people, shopping, taking photos, pushing, shoving, laughing and spitting, tour guides whistling and clapping their hands, coach upon coach pulling up outside the main gates in a haze of exhaust fumes to spew out their unruly load. The attractive, authentic Han dynasty buildings, with their intersecting inner courtyards, well-kept wooden decorative latticework and carvings, separated by rough cobbled streets, are subjected to a rampage of looting and pillaging quite unlike anything that had once endangered it in the past. You could almost hear the small town creaking under the weight of it, just one more coach load perhaps being the final straw, whereupon the town would collapse, implode, descend into the pits of pandemonium, brought down by its own helpless greed. Once such a beautiful, authentic and ancient place has been officially declared beautiful, authentic and ancient, it's the signal for its surrender.
The surreal thing is, the workers just keep on working. Apart from the population of the town who are actually involved in the tourist trade, every other person just goes about their daily business, cooking, hanging out washing, fixing bicycles, as crowds of mad tour groups fall over each other to take pictures of them. Tourists creep down narrow alleyways for a quick peek, stare into doorways and windows, explore private courtyards, and even go into people’s houses, thinking them exhibits when they're really just homes. At one stage, trying to escape the madding crowd, Clive and I found ourselves in the middle of a wedding party in a secluded courtyard, feeling like skeletons at the feast. Instead of inviting us to join them, the people quite rightly looked daggers at us until we slunk away. It must be strange to live, work, love and die in this place, under the careless scrutiny of absolute strangers. It reminded me of Luss, the small village where they shoot the popular soap opera Take the High Road, in Scotland. When filming is not in progress, tour groups from America, Canada, England, everywhere, are shown round this quaint little Scottish village while the residents, not actors but real people who happen to live there, just carry on regardless as if it's perfectly normal to be ogled at by a bus-load of Australian grannies while you're chopping carrots.
Perhaps because each tour group has only a limited amount of time, allotted to them by their commander-in-chief, the guide, not many of them had managed to scale the fortified walls, so that’s where Nick and I headed. We met an old man up top who hired out bicycles and we cycled round the perimeter of the ancient town. It took us only about an hour, but the tranquility, the fresher air, and most of all the stunning views of Pingyao below us, huddled ancient rooftops like sheep clustered in a pen during a storm, set against the immense dusty yellow flatlands, with mountains looming to all sides in the distance like protective shepherds, proved to be the best part of the day. The wall itself is ten metres high and constructed in the shape of a rough square. It has 72 watchtowers (to represent the 72 sages of China), and 3,000 parapets (standing for the disciples of Confucius). Below you the town lies in higgledy-piggledy criss-cross fashion, and you can see people on the flat rooftop gardens feeding livestock, washing vegetables, throwing sticks to dogs, cleaning machinery. When they look up and catch your eye, you’re left with a choice: hang your head in shame and shuffle off, or brazenly take a photo like a true, unabashed voyeur.
We arrived back at the Railway Hotel in Tai Yuan to find it taken over by a convention of maroon-cassocked monks, each looking identical with their shaven heads, shiny fake Rolex watches and white sports shoes, some of them Reebok, Mizuno or Nike. A monk with a Rolex watch? Weren't they meant to reject materialism and devote their time to inner contemplation? And wasn't a watch pointless anyway, as the monk should surely believe time immeasurable, as he would be reincarnated again and again into eternity, thus time becomes negated, their very idea of it infinite and circular? Maybe he needed a watch so he didn't miss his train when going on holiday. But, aren't holidays in themselves just a materialist construct, and a deviation from the contemplation of... whatever.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
The Train to Tai Yuan
30/05/02
We staggered onto the 6.30 am train to find that the standing room only carriage actually did have seats, but that they were all taken, with a mass of passengers standing all around them. The train had begun in Shanghai, and was packed with people going home for the holiday to visit family. The deal was that you paid for a standing ticket, but if someone got off and vacated their seat, you could sit down on it. This meant that the carriage was full of folk literally standing for a seat, politicking, deal making, cajoling those lucky enough to be sitting, but who were getting off before the train reached Tai Yuan. There were far too many people to each get a seat, however, and we were faced with a potential eleven-hour stand. Gina gulped and gasped like a fish caught on the hook then thrown onto the dock. She began to talk about how nice Qingdao sounded, couldn't we jump off at the next station and go there instead? Clive and I told her we were going to stick to our original plan. The plan we'd worked out months ago. The plan she'd insisted upon gatecrashing, after finding that her other travel arrangements had fallen through. She pulled a face and muttered under her breath.
At the next stop, Jinan, Gina suddenly put on her authoritative voice and said:
'RIGHT!'
We watched her fumble with her suitcase and push her way to the train doors. She turned to look at us.
'Are you coming?'
Clive and I looked at each other, faced with the choice of enjoying the holiday which we'd planned, and Gina had parachuted herself in upon, and leaving her on her own in a strange city in the middle of China, or going with her. Clive slowly shook his head. I nodded. We were staying. To our astonishment, Gina stepped down from the carriage and stomped off into the busy train station. Unaware of our domestic chagrin, the train pulled away on its inexorable route, and took Clive and I with it, Gina-less. She didn't even say goodbye. We're a bit worried about her. She's never been on her own in China before, and I think she's suffering from one of the longest culture shocks in the history of travel. But it was her choice, in the end.
After seven hours of standing with a little guy's elbow nestled into the base of my spine, it was announced that there were some hard sleeper bunks now available. I fought my way to the booth, upgraded our tickets and, at the next stop, Clive and I lugged our rucksacks along the platform, along the length of the train, and made it to carriage number 15 (from carriage number 5) just in time. The next four hours passed much more pleasantly. We talked to some Tai Yuan locals, including an intelligent graduate who was studying English and American literature in Shanghai, and a kind female English teacher who recommended to us the hotel we're staying in, the Railway Hotel, which is adequate, fairly cheap, although dingy in its brown, green and beige colours and a little mouldy-smelling.
The landscape of Shanxi province is fascinating and ancient in a dry, bleached-out way. It's called 'The Yellow Land' as, the further inland you get, the more parched the earth becomes, rivers drying up, mountains yellow and dusty, the newly-arrived sun beating down from a clear blue sky on a sickly, barren, desert opus of huge flat plateaus skirted by shimmering yellow-brown peaks. As the journey progressed, the narrow river that snaked desperately through the dirt gradually became narrower, shallower, until it eventually ended up a dry creek. The thin strips of paddy fields and cypress trees, built on irrigated banks with thin rivulets of water diverted towards them, wither and disappear. All that's left is stone and dust and sun. The train goes through numerous dark tunnels, blasted straight through the yellow mountains, with a huge honk of its horn. Thirty-odd black entrances into the unknown on our eleven hour trip.
Shanxi's economy is driven by coal. Every place glimpsed from the mucky window of our train- crumbling little towns and cities that looked like they needed a refreshing drink of cold water and then a good wash- were mining towns. I was told that the city of Datong is home to China's biggest coal mine, some 300,000 men working there, and that the town is so singularly reliant on its coal, the people's faces have taken on the colour of their money: black. This may have been middle-class snobbery from my travelling companions, most Chinese believing dark skin signifies rural backwardness. This stereotype is exacerbated by the fact that, as rural poverty (the farmers prohibited from owning the land they farm, which belongs to the government) increases in China, so does the population of migrant workers.
Tai Yuan is witnessing a huge influx of peasant farmers looking for jobs in the city, searching for that imagined yellow-brick road in 'The Yellow Land' that will take them away from their rural poverty and make them rich city-dwellers. Many parents work all the hours of the day in the city, to send money home to fund their children's education, the children being brought up by their grandparents. This migration is inter-provincial, many of the immigrants being from the northwest province of Xin Jiang, which is home to a large ethnic minority population, the people looking more like Uzbekistanis or Afghans than Han Chinese. These people are blamed by the Han Chinese for any crime from theft to murder. The graduate student with whom I was happily talking literature, shocked me with a sudden outburst of narrow-mindedness.
'You must be careful in Tai Yuan. There are many Xin Jiang people, and they are dangerous. They will take a knife and kill you for your shoes.'
'That happens in the UK and America too, you know, ' I countered. 'Especially if you're wearing the new Adidas or Nike. And don't you think some Han Chinese commit crimes too?'
This wasn't a very smart remark. It just made him angry.
'No! You do not understand. These people are poor and have no morals. They are low-quality people.'
He actually said that. Low-quality people. So, you take over your neighbour's land, exploit their resources, force them to toe the Party line, then brand them second-class citizens for their trouble. And all in the name of 'The People'. Old Karl Marx'll be turning in his grave. The literature student was talking of the Xin Jiang ethnic minority like some kind of untouchable caste. I mumbled some argument that in every country, every people, there were good and bad, and we mustn't generalise, but he was adamant, prefered to talk rather than listen, and never let up on the subject until eventually giving me some respite by going to the toilet. Clive had been listening to our conversation with some amusement and said, with an ironic twinkle in his eye:
'I bet he's a government spy. You know, the government has spies everywhere, and for some of them, their mission is to talk to foreigners and weed out the bad seeds. Watch what you say.'
The literature graduate came back from the toilet, and we eyed him suspiciously.
Instead of a seedy and dangerous Sodom or Gomorrah, however, we found in Tai Yuan a busy, rough-and-ready vibe, a mixture of well-dressed young people walking arm-in-arm from KFC to the nearest nightclub, and crowds of swarthy workers playing cards, Chinese chess, or just gossiping vehemently on the street corners. Scores of children were skipping and playing tag. The trees were in leaf, the night almost balmy, the city a work unfinished, beaten old dirt-encrusted buildings, like has-been boxers, going toe-to-toe with spanking new skyscrapers and department stores; like any other middle-sized city in this country, in fact.
We staggered onto the 6.30 am train to find that the standing room only carriage actually did have seats, but that they were all taken, with a mass of passengers standing all around them. The train had begun in Shanghai, and was packed with people going home for the holiday to visit family. The deal was that you paid for a standing ticket, but if someone got off and vacated their seat, you could sit down on it. This meant that the carriage was full of folk literally standing for a seat, politicking, deal making, cajoling those lucky enough to be sitting, but who were getting off before the train reached Tai Yuan. There were far too many people to each get a seat, however, and we were faced with a potential eleven-hour stand. Gina gulped and gasped like a fish caught on the hook then thrown onto the dock. She began to talk about how nice Qingdao sounded, couldn't we jump off at the next station and go there instead? Clive and I told her we were going to stick to our original plan. The plan we'd worked out months ago. The plan she'd insisted upon gatecrashing, after finding that her other travel arrangements had fallen through. She pulled a face and muttered under her breath.
At the next stop, Jinan, Gina suddenly put on her authoritative voice and said:
'RIGHT!'
We watched her fumble with her suitcase and push her way to the train doors. She turned to look at us.
'Are you coming?'
Clive and I looked at each other, faced with the choice of enjoying the holiday which we'd planned, and Gina had parachuted herself in upon, and leaving her on her own in a strange city in the middle of China, or going with her. Clive slowly shook his head. I nodded. We were staying. To our astonishment, Gina stepped down from the carriage and stomped off into the busy train station. Unaware of our domestic chagrin, the train pulled away on its inexorable route, and took Clive and I with it, Gina-less. She didn't even say goodbye. We're a bit worried about her. She's never been on her own in China before, and I think she's suffering from one of the longest culture shocks in the history of travel. But it was her choice, in the end.
After seven hours of standing with a little guy's elbow nestled into the base of my spine, it was announced that there were some hard sleeper bunks now available. I fought my way to the booth, upgraded our tickets and, at the next stop, Clive and I lugged our rucksacks along the platform, along the length of the train, and made it to carriage number 15 (from carriage number 5) just in time. The next four hours passed much more pleasantly. We talked to some Tai Yuan locals, including an intelligent graduate who was studying English and American literature in Shanghai, and a kind female English teacher who recommended to us the hotel we're staying in, the Railway Hotel, which is adequate, fairly cheap, although dingy in its brown, green and beige colours and a little mouldy-smelling.
The landscape of Shanxi province is fascinating and ancient in a dry, bleached-out way. It's called 'The Yellow Land' as, the further inland you get, the more parched the earth becomes, rivers drying up, mountains yellow and dusty, the newly-arrived sun beating down from a clear blue sky on a sickly, barren, desert opus of huge flat plateaus skirted by shimmering yellow-brown peaks. As the journey progressed, the narrow river that snaked desperately through the dirt gradually became narrower, shallower, until it eventually ended up a dry creek. The thin strips of paddy fields and cypress trees, built on irrigated banks with thin rivulets of water diverted towards them, wither and disappear. All that's left is stone and dust and sun. The train goes through numerous dark tunnels, blasted straight through the yellow mountains, with a huge honk of its horn. Thirty-odd black entrances into the unknown on our eleven hour trip.
Shanxi's economy is driven by coal. Every place glimpsed from the mucky window of our train- crumbling little towns and cities that looked like they needed a refreshing drink of cold water and then a good wash- were mining towns. I was told that the city of Datong is home to China's biggest coal mine, some 300,000 men working there, and that the town is so singularly reliant on its coal, the people's faces have taken on the colour of their money: black. This may have been middle-class snobbery from my travelling companions, most Chinese believing dark skin signifies rural backwardness. This stereotype is exacerbated by the fact that, as rural poverty (the farmers prohibited from owning the land they farm, which belongs to the government) increases in China, so does the population of migrant workers.
Tai Yuan is witnessing a huge influx of peasant farmers looking for jobs in the city, searching for that imagined yellow-brick road in 'The Yellow Land' that will take them away from their rural poverty and make them rich city-dwellers. Many parents work all the hours of the day in the city, to send money home to fund their children's education, the children being brought up by their grandparents. This migration is inter-provincial, many of the immigrants being from the northwest province of Xin Jiang, which is home to a large ethnic minority population, the people looking more like Uzbekistanis or Afghans than Han Chinese. These people are blamed by the Han Chinese for any crime from theft to murder. The graduate student with whom I was happily talking literature, shocked me with a sudden outburst of narrow-mindedness.
'You must be careful in Tai Yuan. There are many Xin Jiang people, and they are dangerous. They will take a knife and kill you for your shoes.'
'That happens in the UK and America too, you know, ' I countered. 'Especially if you're wearing the new Adidas or Nike. And don't you think some Han Chinese commit crimes too?'
This wasn't a very smart remark. It just made him angry.
'No! You do not understand. These people are poor and have no morals. They are low-quality people.'
He actually said that. Low-quality people. So, you take over your neighbour's land, exploit their resources, force them to toe the Party line, then brand them second-class citizens for their trouble. And all in the name of 'The People'. Old Karl Marx'll be turning in his grave. The literature student was talking of the Xin Jiang ethnic minority like some kind of untouchable caste. I mumbled some argument that in every country, every people, there were good and bad, and we mustn't generalise, but he was adamant, prefered to talk rather than listen, and never let up on the subject until eventually giving me some respite by going to the toilet. Clive had been listening to our conversation with some amusement and said, with an ironic twinkle in his eye:
'I bet he's a government spy. You know, the government has spies everywhere, and for some of them, their mission is to talk to foreigners and weed out the bad seeds. Watch what you say.'
The literature graduate came back from the toilet, and we eyed him suspiciously.
Instead of a seedy and dangerous Sodom or Gomorrah, however, we found in Tai Yuan a busy, rough-and-ready vibe, a mixture of well-dressed young people walking arm-in-arm from KFC to the nearest nightclub, and crowds of swarthy workers playing cards, Chinese chess, or just gossiping vehemently on the street corners. Scores of children were skipping and playing tag. The trees were in leaf, the night almost balmy, the city a work unfinished, beaten old dirt-encrusted buildings, like has-been boxers, going toe-to-toe with spanking new skyscrapers and department stores; like any other middle-sized city in this country, in fact.
Tai Shan
28/05/02
The overnight train journey to Tai'An, the small town at the foot of Tai Shan mountain, was the first good night's sleep I've ever had on a hard sleeper bunk. On arrival, I jumped from the train full of beans, wearing yesterday's blue jeans, blue trainers, red T-shirt and short denim jacket, and found myself shivering in a cold, grey, drizzly day. We approached the mountain down a long road full of temples and souvenir stalls, the drizzle intensifying. I bought a green 'I've been to Tai Shan' pork-pie hat and perched it rakishly on my head like a true tourist, where it sat all the way up the mountain, getting steadily wetter, until I had to wring it out like a dishcloth.
I'm sure the walk up to Zhongtian Men (The Midway Gate to Heaven), the halfway point up the mountain, would have been spectacular, had we been able to see anything. We could just make out deep gorges, bamboo, big rocks, and thick forests with cool glades, to either side of the stone steps, but only to a distance of thirty or forty feet. As the day wore on, the rain got heavier, the mist thicker, and we could make out less and less. We decided to spend the night at the halfway point, as making for the summit would be pointless in this weather.
On the way up, unable to see much in the way of scenery, I contented myself with studying the many tour groups going up and down the mountain in huge lines like herded goats. At the bottom, a group of company-men, all wearing identical shapeless black suits, stopped at a stall and exchanged their identical slip-on black shoes for identical black and white plimsolls, this their only concession to the fact that they weren't actually going to the office today but, in fact, were walking up a very high mountain in the rain. Large groups of students messed around, slipping, laughing and flirting, as if there were no rain at all. Brawny bull-necked businessmen held on tightly to their trophy wives, who tottered and complained their way up the steep slippery steps in incongruous high-heels. Contrasted against these well-off holidaymakers, tiny, shirtless weather-beaten old men lugged heavy bamboo shoulder-poles, a crate of beer or net of watermelons, bags of washing powder or boxes of oranges, hanging from either side of the pole, weighing the men down into back-bending, leg-sapping postures. As the old men struggled slowly up the steps, their warped, disfigured shoulders bore testament to their daily toil.
Clive and I reached The Midway Gate to Heaven a full forty-five minutes before Gina. We found a tiny hostel down a narrow path and paid for the room, no questions asked, despite the stinky toilet. We waited for Gina outside the temple, chatting to the drookit monks and playing with the mucky indigenous children. A soggy wreath of incense merged with the thick mist. Buddhist chants, played on a battered old tape deck, mingled with the pitter-patter of the rain. Tour groups were led past us by dripping tour guides, almost every single tourist proudly sporting a long orange or yellow waterproof bin-liner with hood. It was like watching a strange sci-fi movie where the humans with little flags for weapons have captured the orange and yellow aliens and are taking them off in droves to be experimented upon. Eventually, Gina made it, we dried off, changed our clothes, had some food, and began to feel a little better. However, we were disappointed because it didn’t look like we’d be able to see the sun come up from behind China's holiest mountain the next morning; if anything, the rain was even heavier than before.
29/05/02
Ah, now that's good coffee! I'd stashed some instant coffee packets in my rucksack and, at 5.30 in the morning, I poured hot water from the flask into my stainless-steel travelling cup, and went out into the dawn mist for a look about. There was an impressively mystical view of shifting mountaintops in the windy mist, peaks and pagodas appearing and disappearing high above in grey silhouette. The light skitter of rain on temple roofs. The first smell of incense lit by an early-rising monk. A cat mewling for its breakfast. The aroma of fresh rain-soaked grass and fir trees steaming in the mist. No one stirred, no one talked, nothing else broke the pact of silence the monk and I had made with the encroaching dawn.
Suddenly, a scream. It sounded like Gina. I ran back to our room to find her sitting ashen-faced on her bed. She'd gone to the stinky toilet and had vomited at the stench.
We started for the summit around 8 am. As we progressed higher, the mist and rain again began to increase, and we knew we'd be able to see nothing at the top. It would be a complete whiteout, or should I say, grey-out. Again, we felt a surge of disappointment; surely the view, in fair weather, from over 1,500 metres up, would be breathtaking. But we were never to see it. The stone steps increased in intensity and steepness, getting dangerously narrow and slippery, so that if you lost your footing, at some points you'd be in for a fifty-foot tumble down a steep stone-flagged slope. Treetops and misty gorges shifted and moved below us. Rocky creeks once home to rivers and waterfalls lapped up the rainfall and gurgled and spat. To either side, abandoned boulders sprouted ferns and weeds, and green walls of bamboo tickled the iron railings.
Despite starting early, the higher we ascended, the thicker the misty mass of tourists became. I spent half an hour at the top with a lively bunch of medical students from Jinan, waiting for Clive. I was in all of their photos, none of which I'll ever see. Clive arrived, and we spent some time exploring the summit's various temples and viewing points, which might have looked impressive set against a backdrop of towering green mountain peaks and wooded descents, but now looked forlorn, sad and grey in the foggy drizzle. We studied the rock formations, which Clive identified as quartzite and serpentine. The huge stones jutted out at weird angles, some pointing straight up to the sky like thick bulbous fingers, some rounded and flat like giants' gravestones. Formed in some Neolithic storm, a clashing together of huge glaciers, they sat foreboding and intransigent in the mist. Most striking was the Boulder Bridge, a humpbacked formation of connected rocks that had somehow lodged themselves between two sides of a deep crevasse to form a bridge of improbable natural design.
It was, however, cold and wet so, once we'd found Gina, we decided to head back down. I was more prepared for the conditions today, having bought a bright orange plastic poncho and red 'I've been to Tai Shan' headscarf from a stall at the Midway Gate to Heaven. I must have looked mighty strange, but that still didn’t excuse the comments Clive and I received on our descent. As we walked, we were subjected not just to the usual stares, but to continual insults as well. Clive's Chinese is quite good now, and he can understand much of what is said to him, or should I say, about him. We were called ugly, stupid, strange, hairy, and big-nosed, the last of which I do take offence to.
'What can you do?' Clive says, ever the pragmatist. 'Cindy taught me a phrase to say: ni zai kan shen me? Which directly translated means: You looking at what?'
'Cool. Have you tried it out yet?'
'Yeah, first time I tried it, the guy just stared at me even more!'
'D'you think he understood you?'
'He understood my words, of course, but not my meaning. He looked at me as if to say: 'What d'you think I'm staring at? I'm staring at a strange-looking foreigner! Any self-respecting Chinese would do the same thing and, if I could, I'd sell tickets.''
We reached the bottom late afternoon, walked out the main gate, and down the long street full of temples and trinket shops, Gina lagging behind. It's not that we were walking fast, it's just whenever we walked slower, she somehow managed to outdo us and find an even lower gear than we were already in, stopping every five minutes to catch her breath or complain about her sore feet. We'd stop, wait for her to catch up then have to wait for her to rest. Impatient, we'd walk away even more slowly than before but then, just moments later, turn back to see her motionless, standing like a distant shadowy obelisk in the rain. It was frustrating for us, and unbearable for her.
Deciding to take the mountain to Mohammed, we got into a taxi and found a clean two-star hotel in the centre of the small city of Tai'An. The city is gearing itself up for a busy week of tourists; we're gearing ourselves up for a standing-room only train journey back west along the Yellow River (which surely must have some water in it now, after all this rain) to Tai Yuan, which leaves at 6.30 am tomorrow morning. When Clive and I returned from the train station, Gina was decidedly unhappy to find out that the train was standing room only, and furious when she heard the departure time. We told her to get the tickets herself next time, rather than sleeping in her hotel bed whilst we did the pushing and shoving at the station. There's a vibe like a bad smell in our room tonight, but I've a feeling it won't stop me sleeping.
The overnight train journey to Tai'An, the small town at the foot of Tai Shan mountain, was the first good night's sleep I've ever had on a hard sleeper bunk. On arrival, I jumped from the train full of beans, wearing yesterday's blue jeans, blue trainers, red T-shirt and short denim jacket, and found myself shivering in a cold, grey, drizzly day. We approached the mountain down a long road full of temples and souvenir stalls, the drizzle intensifying. I bought a green 'I've been to Tai Shan' pork-pie hat and perched it rakishly on my head like a true tourist, where it sat all the way up the mountain, getting steadily wetter, until I had to wring it out like a dishcloth.
I'm sure the walk up to Zhongtian Men (The Midway Gate to Heaven), the halfway point up the mountain, would have been spectacular, had we been able to see anything. We could just make out deep gorges, bamboo, big rocks, and thick forests with cool glades, to either side of the stone steps, but only to a distance of thirty or forty feet. As the day wore on, the rain got heavier, the mist thicker, and we could make out less and less. We decided to spend the night at the halfway point, as making for the summit would be pointless in this weather.
On the way up, unable to see much in the way of scenery, I contented myself with studying the many tour groups going up and down the mountain in huge lines like herded goats. At the bottom, a group of company-men, all wearing identical shapeless black suits, stopped at a stall and exchanged their identical slip-on black shoes for identical black and white plimsolls, this their only concession to the fact that they weren't actually going to the office today but, in fact, were walking up a very high mountain in the rain. Large groups of students messed around, slipping, laughing and flirting, as if there were no rain at all. Brawny bull-necked businessmen held on tightly to their trophy wives, who tottered and complained their way up the steep slippery steps in incongruous high-heels. Contrasted against these well-off holidaymakers, tiny, shirtless weather-beaten old men lugged heavy bamboo shoulder-poles, a crate of beer or net of watermelons, bags of washing powder or boxes of oranges, hanging from either side of the pole, weighing the men down into back-bending, leg-sapping postures. As the old men struggled slowly up the steps, their warped, disfigured shoulders bore testament to their daily toil.
Clive and I reached The Midway Gate to Heaven a full forty-five minutes before Gina. We found a tiny hostel down a narrow path and paid for the room, no questions asked, despite the stinky toilet. We waited for Gina outside the temple, chatting to the drookit monks and playing with the mucky indigenous children. A soggy wreath of incense merged with the thick mist. Buddhist chants, played on a battered old tape deck, mingled with the pitter-patter of the rain. Tour groups were led past us by dripping tour guides, almost every single tourist proudly sporting a long orange or yellow waterproof bin-liner with hood. It was like watching a strange sci-fi movie where the humans with little flags for weapons have captured the orange and yellow aliens and are taking them off in droves to be experimented upon. Eventually, Gina made it, we dried off, changed our clothes, had some food, and began to feel a little better. However, we were disappointed because it didn’t look like we’d be able to see the sun come up from behind China's holiest mountain the next morning; if anything, the rain was even heavier than before.
29/05/02
Ah, now that's good coffee! I'd stashed some instant coffee packets in my rucksack and, at 5.30 in the morning, I poured hot water from the flask into my stainless-steel travelling cup, and went out into the dawn mist for a look about. There was an impressively mystical view of shifting mountaintops in the windy mist, peaks and pagodas appearing and disappearing high above in grey silhouette. The light skitter of rain on temple roofs. The first smell of incense lit by an early-rising monk. A cat mewling for its breakfast. The aroma of fresh rain-soaked grass and fir trees steaming in the mist. No one stirred, no one talked, nothing else broke the pact of silence the monk and I had made with the encroaching dawn.
Suddenly, a scream. It sounded like Gina. I ran back to our room to find her sitting ashen-faced on her bed. She'd gone to the stinky toilet and had vomited at the stench.
We started for the summit around 8 am. As we progressed higher, the mist and rain again began to increase, and we knew we'd be able to see nothing at the top. It would be a complete whiteout, or should I say, grey-out. Again, we felt a surge of disappointment; surely the view, in fair weather, from over 1,500 metres up, would be breathtaking. But we were never to see it. The stone steps increased in intensity and steepness, getting dangerously narrow and slippery, so that if you lost your footing, at some points you'd be in for a fifty-foot tumble down a steep stone-flagged slope. Treetops and misty gorges shifted and moved below us. Rocky creeks once home to rivers and waterfalls lapped up the rainfall and gurgled and spat. To either side, abandoned boulders sprouted ferns and weeds, and green walls of bamboo tickled the iron railings.
Despite starting early, the higher we ascended, the thicker the misty mass of tourists became. I spent half an hour at the top with a lively bunch of medical students from Jinan, waiting for Clive. I was in all of their photos, none of which I'll ever see. Clive arrived, and we spent some time exploring the summit's various temples and viewing points, which might have looked impressive set against a backdrop of towering green mountain peaks and wooded descents, but now looked forlorn, sad and grey in the foggy drizzle. We studied the rock formations, which Clive identified as quartzite and serpentine. The huge stones jutted out at weird angles, some pointing straight up to the sky like thick bulbous fingers, some rounded and flat like giants' gravestones. Formed in some Neolithic storm, a clashing together of huge glaciers, they sat foreboding and intransigent in the mist. Most striking was the Boulder Bridge, a humpbacked formation of connected rocks that had somehow lodged themselves between two sides of a deep crevasse to form a bridge of improbable natural design.
It was, however, cold and wet so, once we'd found Gina, we decided to head back down. I was more prepared for the conditions today, having bought a bright orange plastic poncho and red 'I've been to Tai Shan' headscarf from a stall at the Midway Gate to Heaven. I must have looked mighty strange, but that still didn’t excuse the comments Clive and I received on our descent. As we walked, we were subjected not just to the usual stares, but to continual insults as well. Clive's Chinese is quite good now, and he can understand much of what is said to him, or should I say, about him. We were called ugly, stupid, strange, hairy, and big-nosed, the last of which I do take offence to.
'What can you do?' Clive says, ever the pragmatist. 'Cindy taught me a phrase to say: ni zai kan shen me? Which directly translated means: You looking at what?'
'Cool. Have you tried it out yet?'
'Yeah, first time I tried it, the guy just stared at me even more!'
'D'you think he understood you?'
'He understood my words, of course, but not my meaning. He looked at me as if to say: 'What d'you think I'm staring at? I'm staring at a strange-looking foreigner! Any self-respecting Chinese would do the same thing and, if I could, I'd sell tickets.''
We reached the bottom late afternoon, walked out the main gate, and down the long street full of temples and trinket shops, Gina lagging behind. It's not that we were walking fast, it's just whenever we walked slower, she somehow managed to outdo us and find an even lower gear than we were already in, stopping every five minutes to catch her breath or complain about her sore feet. We'd stop, wait for her to catch up then have to wait for her to rest. Impatient, we'd walk away even more slowly than before but then, just moments later, turn back to see her motionless, standing like a distant shadowy obelisk in the rain. It was frustrating for us, and unbearable for her.
Deciding to take the mountain to Mohammed, we got into a taxi and found a clean two-star hotel in the centre of the small city of Tai'An. The city is gearing itself up for a busy week of tourists; we're gearing ourselves up for a standing-room only train journey back west along the Yellow River (which surely must have some water in it now, after all this rain) to Tai Yuan, which leaves at 6.30 am tomorrow morning. When Clive and I returned from the train station, Gina was decidedly unhappy to find out that the train was standing room only, and furious when she heard the departure time. We told her to get the tickets herself next time, rather than sleeping in her hotel bed whilst we did the pushing and shoving at the station. There's a vibe like a bad smell in our room tonight, but I've a feeling it won't stop me sleeping.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
The Pits
Class finished on the Friday, giving Clive, Gina and I plenty of time to get ready for our expedition to Tai Shan (one of the five holy mountains of China, climbed by both Confucius and Chairman Mao), and beyond. May 1st to 7th is a national holiday in China, and we've been told that Tai Shan will be packed, but we still can't wait to get going. Harbin is in the grip of a mini-heat wave; I'm wearing a T-shirt and jeans, outside, for god's sake!
And that's why I've shaved my pits. You see, in Harbin you can't find deodorant. No one seems to wear it. Actually, for near enough ten months of the year no one actually needs it, but when the hot weather does come around, the locals just tend to, well, smell. The city is still happily untouched by big western supermarkets, but this creates a problem in the hot weather. What do you do to avoid being smelly? I asked Alan.
'When I worked in Wuxi, south China,' he said, 'you couldn't buy deodorant there either, and it was really hot. Someone told me that it wasn't actually your armpits, but your armpit hair that held the smell. You see, the sweat dries and sticks to the hair. Then it begins to smell.'
'So you're saying that you actually shaved your pits?'
'Had to. You sweat like a bastard in south China, and by the end of the day you really stink.'
'But didn't it... feel... weird?'
'It did at first, but I didn't smell anymore.'
Alan's eyes glinted with a sarcastic humour I didn't quite trust, but what he said made sense. I decided to give it a try and went back to my room. I skooshed some shaving foam under my arms and began to drag the razor across them. The concave shape of the pits made it quite a tricky procedure, and the hair was long, jagging and ripping if I moved the razor too fast. I caught sight of myself in the mirror and saw the ridiculousness of the situation. It was then I realised Alan had been having me on. However, it was too late by then, so I decided to finish the job properly. Afterwards, my armpits looked a strange, alien, sickly shade of white, and they tingled and stung mercilessly.
I picked up my rucksack and went up to the fifth floor lounge to wait for the others, my pits crying out fiercely with displeasure. Alan was sprawled on the sofa, watching a DVD.
'You shaved your pits, then?'
'Umm...'
'You did, didn't you?'
'Yeah.'
He fell off the sofa laughing.
Clive, Gina and I are now sitting on the train, rattling across sun-kissed fields under a blue sky. The train is comfortable and quiet, as most people are not on holiday yet. We're taking it in turns to occupy the two plastic seats at the window while the other one sits on the bottom bunk. In these six-bunk compartments the bottom bunks are a free-for-all. Whole families take over the space to sit, eat, gossip and play cards. I guess if you actually told them that this was your bed and you wanted to sleep, they’d move, but I haven’t seen anyone try it so far. However, the shared space of the bunks engenders a communal, friendly atmosphere, where strangers can become fast friends during the length of a journey. Every now and again we get hot water from an ancient, coal-fuelled boiler to fill our flasks, the red coals somehow a tenuous surviving symbol of an earlier, receding time.
And that's why I've shaved my pits. You see, in Harbin you can't find deodorant. No one seems to wear it. Actually, for near enough ten months of the year no one actually needs it, but when the hot weather does come around, the locals just tend to, well, smell. The city is still happily untouched by big western supermarkets, but this creates a problem in the hot weather. What do you do to avoid being smelly? I asked Alan.
'When I worked in Wuxi, south China,' he said, 'you couldn't buy deodorant there either, and it was really hot. Someone told me that it wasn't actually your armpits, but your armpit hair that held the smell. You see, the sweat dries and sticks to the hair. Then it begins to smell.'
'So you're saying that you actually shaved your pits?'
'Had to. You sweat like a bastard in south China, and by the end of the day you really stink.'
'But didn't it... feel... weird?'
'It did at first, but I didn't smell anymore.'
Alan's eyes glinted with a sarcastic humour I didn't quite trust, but what he said made sense. I decided to give it a try and went back to my room. I skooshed some shaving foam under my arms and began to drag the razor across them. The concave shape of the pits made it quite a tricky procedure, and the hair was long, jagging and ripping if I moved the razor too fast. I caught sight of myself in the mirror and saw the ridiculousness of the situation. It was then I realised Alan had been having me on. However, it was too late by then, so I decided to finish the job properly. Afterwards, my armpits looked a strange, alien, sickly shade of white, and they tingled and stung mercilessly.
I picked up my rucksack and went up to the fifth floor lounge to wait for the others, my pits crying out fiercely with displeasure. Alan was sprawled on the sofa, watching a DVD.
'You shaved your pits, then?'
'Umm...'
'You did, didn't you?'
'Yeah.'
He fell off the sofa laughing.
Clive, Gina and I are now sitting on the train, rattling across sun-kissed fields under a blue sky. The train is comfortable and quiet, as most people are not on holiday yet. We're taking it in turns to occupy the two plastic seats at the window while the other one sits on the bottom bunk. In these six-bunk compartments the bottom bunks are a free-for-all. Whole families take over the space to sit, eat, gossip and play cards. I guess if you actually told them that this was your bed and you wanted to sleep, they’d move, but I haven’t seen anyone try it so far. However, the shared space of the bunks engenders a communal, friendly atmosphere, where strangers can become fast friends during the length of a journey. Every now and again we get hot water from an ancient, coal-fuelled boiler to fill our flasks, the red coals somehow a tenuous surviving symbol of an earlier, receding time.
Stood Up
It should have been the perfect day. Went on another school trip to the Song Feng Shan mountain range, this time to an ex game reserve, an ancient deciduous forest with long thin pine trees sprouting from steep glacial ridges, which formed high, narrow natural paths to tightrope-walk along. In the afternoon, we got back in time to meet some friends we've made from the Commercial University, for our weekly kick-about. There's little or no grass in Harbin, so our football is played on a dustbowl, with ancient rusted goalposts, broken bottles and empty noodle cartons littering the pitch. Went home, showered, got spruced up, and I was in the perfect mood to finish the day on a perfect, happy hat trick.
We ate at the Shepherd's Pie Place, then on to Gong Da, and from there to the Banana Bar, in a retracing of our steps from Wednesday night only this time, I hoped, without the prostitutes. I was meeting Liu Yang at 10 pm; Tam and Clive, either to keep me company, or to get a closer look at Liu Yang, came with me. We had a drink at the bar as we waited for her. And waited. And waited. She never showed. I couldn't understand it. What was with the e-card, the phone calls, the enthusiasm, if she wasn't interested? How could she have lost interest so quickly? Had I done something wrong?
'Everything seemed to be going so well,' I told Nick and Matt, just in case they thought Liu Yang was a figment of my imagination. 'We went shopping this week and had a nice time. I don’t understand it.'
'Maybe you said something, did something, that she didn't like. You know, Chinese girls are different. It's impossible to tell what they think.' Clive said, with the benefit of experience.
'Well, she did say that she didn't like my hat. But, I mean, I thought she was joking.’
'What colour was it?'
'Huh?'
'What colour was the hat?'
'Green.'
'Oh. Oh dear...'
Nick made a face, the kind you make when a child does something wrong and doesn't realise it.
'You know, if someone wears a green hat in China, it means their partner is having an affair.'
'Really? But, how was I supposed to know that? And how could that have changed her feelings towards me?'
'Maybe she just thought there were too many cultural differences, too many difficulties dating a foreigner. Or maybe you just had BO, or a bit of spinach stuck in your teeth, and the hat had nothing to do with it.'
Perhaps she'd just taken offence to me wearing my stupid pork-pie hat on our first date, regardless of the colour. And if that was the case, I only had myself to blame. Girls are a mystery to me at the best of times, and Chinese girls were no different, were, in fact, more of a mystery to me, with the language and cultural differences taken into account. I didn't want to drink, or play Connect 4, and I certainly didn't want to dance. I was home before midnight. I tried to contact Liu Yang a number of times during the week, but she never answered her phone or replied to my emails.
We ate at the Shepherd's Pie Place, then on to Gong Da, and from there to the Banana Bar, in a retracing of our steps from Wednesday night only this time, I hoped, without the prostitutes. I was meeting Liu Yang at 10 pm; Tam and Clive, either to keep me company, or to get a closer look at Liu Yang, came with me. We had a drink at the bar as we waited for her. And waited. And waited. She never showed. I couldn't understand it. What was with the e-card, the phone calls, the enthusiasm, if she wasn't interested? How could she have lost interest so quickly? Had I done something wrong?
'Everything seemed to be going so well,' I told Nick and Matt, just in case they thought Liu Yang was a figment of my imagination. 'We went shopping this week and had a nice time. I don’t understand it.'
'Maybe you said something, did something, that she didn't like. You know, Chinese girls are different. It's impossible to tell what they think.' Clive said, with the benefit of experience.
'Well, she did say that she didn't like my hat. But, I mean, I thought she was joking.’
'What colour was it?'
'Huh?'
'What colour was the hat?'
'Green.'
'Oh. Oh dear...'
Nick made a face, the kind you make when a child does something wrong and doesn't realise it.
'You know, if someone wears a green hat in China, it means their partner is having an affair.'
'Really? But, how was I supposed to know that? And how could that have changed her feelings towards me?'
'Maybe she just thought there were too many cultural differences, too many difficulties dating a foreigner. Or maybe you just had BO, or a bit of spinach stuck in your teeth, and the hat had nothing to do with it.'
Perhaps she'd just taken offence to me wearing my stupid pork-pie hat on our first date, regardless of the colour. And if that was the case, I only had myself to blame. Girls are a mystery to me at the best of times, and Chinese girls were no different, were, in fact, more of a mystery to me, with the language and cultural differences taken into account. I didn't want to drink, or play Connect 4, and I certainly didn't want to dance. I was home before midnight. I tried to contact Liu Yang a number of times during the week, but she never answered her phone or replied to my emails.
Turning Thirty
My birthday was on the Wednesday, a crap day for a birthday, as I have classes all day, and then all day Thursday too. I'd decided to take it easy then have a big blow out on Saturday night at the Banana. Fat chance.
I was so busy I didn't really have the time to come to terms with my three-decade milestone, but it did occur to me that I could still have been working in that hellish kitchen in Warwick, with no friends and a relationship on the rocks; instead, here I was in Harbin, doing a job I really enjoyed.
On Wednesday morning I've PET1 followed by PET3. I wasn't sure whether to just play games with them or give them a proper lesson, so I compromised with a lesson plan that would take me up to the end of the first hour, then leave time to play some games in the second. I was also worried about CW (Charles' Wife) catching me playing games as she stalked around the classrooms like an unlucky black cat. She just happens to be my class monitor, as well as my boss.
I wasn't in the mood for teaching, however, and thankfully did not get the chance. As soon as I entered the PET1 classroom at 8 am, the students stood up and subjected me to a forceful rendition of 'Happy Birthday' in English, then produced a huge fluffy creamy birthday cake. I couldn't make them work after that, could I? I'm sure they were banking on it. I had brought along some board games - Jenga, Connect 4 - so we played those instead, chatting away in English as we munched on the fluffy, creamy cake. Lisa, Moon and Maggie, the cutest troublemakers you've ever seen, started to throw bits of the birthday cake at me. They smeared cream all over my face and into my hair, I retaliated, and soon the whole class was engulfed in a creamy chaotic cake fight.
PET3 were even more chilled. I've made some inroads into this class, and have built up a decent relationship with them, pretty much by using the carrot and stick approach. They're still incredibly lazy, but nice with it. They gave me a card, signed by all, a cactus, and a bunch of lychees, which we peeled and ate noisily as we played cards. Instead of using money, the kids tore thin strips of paper that they wetted on their tongues then stuck onto their faces when they lost. Kitty never won a game, and ended up looking like The Girl In The Paper Mask, only her beautiful eyes visible beneath the white; Camel and Henry, whose hobbies are smoking cigarettes and playing cards (possibly in training for government jobs or managerial positions after they graduate) were, not surprisingly, the winners.
Over the course of the day I was given: a set of bongos (Tam); a fig tree in a terracotta pot (Patrick); a photography and design book (Danuka and Ken); a sketch pad and pencils (Anita); a silver hip flask and bottle of bei jiu (Gina); and a decorative wooden box, all the way from Dubai (Clive); funniest present of the day goes to Andy, who gave me a plastic key-ring with a picture of the World Cup on it, saying: 'ere's something no Scotsman will ever get their 'ands on.'
That night we ate at Big Portions. Everybody came apart from Danuka; we've kind of grown apart recently, not sure why. I had six hours to teach on Thursday, and didn't want to overdo it on the beer. Matty had other ideas:
'Happy birthday, you old git. Gan bei!'
I emptied the glass.
'Yeah, have a good one. Gan bei!' From Patrick.
Right round the table, every one of the fifteen teachers demanded I empty my glass then some of them did it again. Twenty or more glasses of beer later, taking it easy was no longer an option. After pitchers in Gong Da, Ken, Clive and I somehow ended up at the Banana Bar three days early. I was not meant to be there. It was only Wednesday. We drank beer at the bar and played Connect 4 with two barmaids, who kept letting us win, to give us face so we'd spend more money, to the point where we were deliberately overlooking obvious rows of three in an attempt to lose. The three counters seemed to represent the three decades I'd just lived, and I wasn't quite ready to bring on the fourth just yet. I was so drunk, a three-year old would have beaten me, but the barmaid was determined.
Ken left, but Clive and I wanted to dance. We asked the two barmaids up with us and, after consulting their boss, they agreed. Clive got the stunning one, leaving me with the gawky awkward girl, but I didn't care. I had gone shopping with Liu Yang the day before, and today she had sent me a sweet birthday e-card. I was looking forward to dancing with her again on this very floor on Saturday. Back at the bar for one more beer, the two barmaids started pointing to themselves, then at us, then at the door, seeming to suggest we go home with them. I looked at Clive suspiciously, but he beamed back at me, nodding his head eagerly. I suggested we go back and dance for a while longer. As soon as we got onto the dance floor, the two girls were right there, by our sides, pulling at our arms.
I must attest to my innocence in all of this. I had a date in three days time. I wasn't going to spoil it. And anyway, Clive had the beautiful one! I warned him off them. Where was their home, anyway? Was it safe to get in a taxi with them and go to some strange place, where we might be robbed? Did he want to take the risk? He increased nodding speed. I pulled him grudgingly out the door towards a waiting taxi. We heard a shriek, and saw the girls running out after us like Valkyries over a battlefield. I had Clive by the left arm, but the cute barmaid had grabbed his right and was dragging him away. He looked at me as if to say: 'What can I do?'
Valhalla beckoned. As I pulled against the barmaid, the other one started to pull me, so that we became a scuffling, wobbling whole, like a drunken centipede, each bit of its body with a volition of its own so that it moves and wriggles every which way, but never gets anywhere.
Then the cute barmaid made a mistake: releasing one hand, she rubbed thumb and forefinger together in a universal sign-language and shouted what was probably the only English word she knew: 'Money!' This gave me the chance to give Clive one final wrench, and get him into the taxi, where he sat unhappily all the way back to the college.
I was so busy I didn't really have the time to come to terms with my three-decade milestone, but it did occur to me that I could still have been working in that hellish kitchen in Warwick, with no friends and a relationship on the rocks; instead, here I was in Harbin, doing a job I really enjoyed.
On Wednesday morning I've PET1 followed by PET3. I wasn't sure whether to just play games with them or give them a proper lesson, so I compromised with a lesson plan that would take me up to the end of the first hour, then leave time to play some games in the second. I was also worried about CW (Charles' Wife) catching me playing games as she stalked around the classrooms like an unlucky black cat. She just happens to be my class monitor, as well as my boss.
I wasn't in the mood for teaching, however, and thankfully did not get the chance. As soon as I entered the PET1 classroom at 8 am, the students stood up and subjected me to a forceful rendition of 'Happy Birthday' in English, then produced a huge fluffy creamy birthday cake. I couldn't make them work after that, could I? I'm sure they were banking on it. I had brought along some board games - Jenga, Connect 4 - so we played those instead, chatting away in English as we munched on the fluffy, creamy cake. Lisa, Moon and Maggie, the cutest troublemakers you've ever seen, started to throw bits of the birthday cake at me. They smeared cream all over my face and into my hair, I retaliated, and soon the whole class was engulfed in a creamy chaotic cake fight.
PET3 were even more chilled. I've made some inroads into this class, and have built up a decent relationship with them, pretty much by using the carrot and stick approach. They're still incredibly lazy, but nice with it. They gave me a card, signed by all, a cactus, and a bunch of lychees, which we peeled and ate noisily as we played cards. Instead of using money, the kids tore thin strips of paper that they wetted on their tongues then stuck onto their faces when they lost. Kitty never won a game, and ended up looking like The Girl In The Paper Mask, only her beautiful eyes visible beneath the white; Camel and Henry, whose hobbies are smoking cigarettes and playing cards (possibly in training for government jobs or managerial positions after they graduate) were, not surprisingly, the winners.
Over the course of the day I was given: a set of bongos (Tam); a fig tree in a terracotta pot (Patrick); a photography and design book (Danuka and Ken); a sketch pad and pencils (Anita); a silver hip flask and bottle of bei jiu (Gina); and a decorative wooden box, all the way from Dubai (Clive); funniest present of the day goes to Andy, who gave me a plastic key-ring with a picture of the World Cup on it, saying: 'ere's something no Scotsman will ever get their 'ands on.'
That night we ate at Big Portions. Everybody came apart from Danuka; we've kind of grown apart recently, not sure why. I had six hours to teach on Thursday, and didn't want to overdo it on the beer. Matty had other ideas:
'Happy birthday, you old git. Gan bei!'
I emptied the glass.
'Yeah, have a good one. Gan bei!' From Patrick.
Right round the table, every one of the fifteen teachers demanded I empty my glass then some of them did it again. Twenty or more glasses of beer later, taking it easy was no longer an option. After pitchers in Gong Da, Ken, Clive and I somehow ended up at the Banana Bar three days early. I was not meant to be there. It was only Wednesday. We drank beer at the bar and played Connect 4 with two barmaids, who kept letting us win, to give us face so we'd spend more money, to the point where we were deliberately overlooking obvious rows of three in an attempt to lose. The three counters seemed to represent the three decades I'd just lived, and I wasn't quite ready to bring on the fourth just yet. I was so drunk, a three-year old would have beaten me, but the barmaid was determined.
Ken left, but Clive and I wanted to dance. We asked the two barmaids up with us and, after consulting their boss, they agreed. Clive got the stunning one, leaving me with the gawky awkward girl, but I didn't care. I had gone shopping with Liu Yang the day before, and today she had sent me a sweet birthday e-card. I was looking forward to dancing with her again on this very floor on Saturday. Back at the bar for one more beer, the two barmaids started pointing to themselves, then at us, then at the door, seeming to suggest we go home with them. I looked at Clive suspiciously, but he beamed back at me, nodding his head eagerly. I suggested we go back and dance for a while longer. As soon as we got onto the dance floor, the two girls were right there, by our sides, pulling at our arms.
I must attest to my innocence in all of this. I had a date in three days time. I wasn't going to spoil it. And anyway, Clive had the beautiful one! I warned him off them. Where was their home, anyway? Was it safe to get in a taxi with them and go to some strange place, where we might be robbed? Did he want to take the risk? He increased nodding speed. I pulled him grudgingly out the door towards a waiting taxi. We heard a shriek, and saw the girls running out after us like Valkyries over a battlefield. I had Clive by the left arm, but the cute barmaid had grabbed his right and was dragging him away. He looked at me as if to say: 'What can I do?'
Valhalla beckoned. As I pulled against the barmaid, the other one started to pull me, so that we became a scuffling, wobbling whole, like a drunken centipede, each bit of its body with a volition of its own so that it moves and wriggles every which way, but never gets anywhere.
Then the cute barmaid made a mistake: releasing one hand, she rubbed thumb and forefinger together in a universal sign-language and shouted what was probably the only English word she knew: 'Money!' This gave me the chance to give Clive one final wrench, and get him into the taxi, where he sat unhappily all the way back to the college.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Liu Yang
April 2002
I met her in the Banana Bar club in Nan Gang the Saturday before my birthday, and we had a brief, bright, but quickly extinguished…what? Affair? No, no sex. Relationship? No, no commitment was made. I don't know what to call it, but from being the perfect thirtieth birthday present, a promise of fireworks, we became a damp squib, and I don't know why.
It's gone two and I'm dancing with Tam, Clive and Ken on the sprung, bouncy, neon-lit dance floor amidst thick dry ice. Clive is doing the bump-and-grind with a tall, big-boned girl who's all elbows, Tam is gesticulating in that middle-weight boxer style, while Ken is wrapping himself lizard-like around the pole on the stage, forcing his body into all sorts of painful contortions as a group of hormonally-charged teenage girls make eyes at him and scream. Liu Yang starts dancing beside me, then with me, then against me, in tight black jeans, black v-neck top, long hair up in a pony-tail, and these funky black glasses that make her look like a cross between a downhill skier and a pop star.
The music stops and the lights come on. It's time for the exotic dancers or, to call a spade a spade, the strippers. The floor's cleared and, as the men start whooping, and the women start cursing their whooping men, Liu Yang and I escape to the bar for a drink. Under the brighter lights of the bar I realise she's not just cute, but actually quite beautiful: clear pale skin, sparkling eyes, lovely smile, and with kind, tactile mannerisms. We make the usual small talk. She's from Da Qing, studies English at Harbin Normal University, has one year of her studies left. She's still not sure what she wants to do after she graduates. The music starts up again, and we spend the rest of the night dancing together. When it's time for her to go, she takes me by the hand and leads me to the cloakroom, where she finds a pen in her bag and we exchange numbers. We arrange to go shopping during the week, and I invite her to my birthday celebrations the next weekend, she leaves with her friends, and I spend the rest of the night on a cloud floating somewhere above the dry ice.
I met her in the Banana Bar club in Nan Gang the Saturday before my birthday, and we had a brief, bright, but quickly extinguished…what? Affair? No, no sex. Relationship? No, no commitment was made. I don't know what to call it, but from being the perfect thirtieth birthday present, a promise of fireworks, we became a damp squib, and I don't know why.
It's gone two and I'm dancing with Tam, Clive and Ken on the sprung, bouncy, neon-lit dance floor amidst thick dry ice. Clive is doing the bump-and-grind with a tall, big-boned girl who's all elbows, Tam is gesticulating in that middle-weight boxer style, while Ken is wrapping himself lizard-like around the pole on the stage, forcing his body into all sorts of painful contortions as a group of hormonally-charged teenage girls make eyes at him and scream. Liu Yang starts dancing beside me, then with me, then against me, in tight black jeans, black v-neck top, long hair up in a pony-tail, and these funky black glasses that make her look like a cross between a downhill skier and a pop star.
The music stops and the lights come on. It's time for the exotic dancers or, to call a spade a spade, the strippers. The floor's cleared and, as the men start whooping, and the women start cursing their whooping men, Liu Yang and I escape to the bar for a drink. Under the brighter lights of the bar I realise she's not just cute, but actually quite beautiful: clear pale skin, sparkling eyes, lovely smile, and with kind, tactile mannerisms. We make the usual small talk. She's from Da Qing, studies English at Harbin Normal University, has one year of her studies left. She's still not sure what she wants to do after she graduates. The music starts up again, and we spend the rest of the night dancing together. When it's time for her to go, she takes me by the hand and leads me to the cloakroom, where she finds a pen in her bag and we exchange numbers. We arrange to go shopping during the week, and I invite her to my birthday celebrations the next weekend, she leaves with her friends, and I spend the rest of the night on a cloud floating somewhere above the dry ice.
Wuchang again, and again
Clive and I have been back to Wuchang to earn our extra pocket money two or three times now; but it, too, has changed, and is losing its previous allure. A lot of this has to do with the lack of social time with Rina, and the disappearance of Cindy.
Rina is now studying English full time at the HIT University in Harbin, then coming back home to Wuchang to teach two full weekend days at her little school. It must be exhausting. She lacks confidence in her English, although I think her speaking, especially, is quite good. Tiredness and this only half-hidden insecurity have turned her into a zombie-like apparition, who stumbles and mumbles about, muttering to herself and complaining. Poor Rina, formerly the queen of gregariousness, a bolt of lightning, a shot of adrenalin, has aged before my eyes. You just want to give her a hug, tell her everything will be all right, then give her a kick up the arse and tell her to snap out of it.
Even more sadly, at least for Clive, who is broken-hearted, is Cindy’s elopement. It turns out that not only did Cindy have Clive, plus his Chinese rival in Harbin (a businessman her family wanted her to marry but whom she refused), but she also had a third man, her first love who lives in Beijing, and it was to him she ran when things got too much for her. She moved in with her old flame, found a job in sales, hated it, quit, and is now, according to Rina, as unhappy as ever, as she's feeling guilty and missing her family, but is too proud to come home.
My nemesis Danny is now our main minder. He acts the part of welcoming host, but seems anxious to get rid of us as quickly as possible when the work is done. Long gone are the nights out and the dancing at Happy Sundays, a distant memory the staggering back at five in the morning to awaken the sleepy night porter at the Overlook Hotel. And yet, after class, Danny still says, 'See you in two weeks,' and we find ourselves pressured into agreeing to just one more weekend. We have to sign our names on pay slips now, which Danny keeps in a locked drawer, and we wonder if, in the future, we ever say 'no' to working in Wuchang, will he use this evidence, and his contacts at the college, to make our lives difficult there? A dangerous game, but one we went into quite willingly, so can't really complain about.
That Sunday morning Clive opened the curtains and we looked out onto the low-rise mess of the little town to find it covered in three inches of red sand, a storm the night before having come in from the Gobi desert and enveloped the place. Cars, bikes, rooftops, pavements, balconies, streets and walls, all covered in red sand and enveloped and strange and alien, like a scene from Mars.
Rina is now studying English full time at the HIT University in Harbin, then coming back home to Wuchang to teach two full weekend days at her little school. It must be exhausting. She lacks confidence in her English, although I think her speaking, especially, is quite good. Tiredness and this only half-hidden insecurity have turned her into a zombie-like apparition, who stumbles and mumbles about, muttering to herself and complaining. Poor Rina, formerly the queen of gregariousness, a bolt of lightning, a shot of adrenalin, has aged before my eyes. You just want to give her a hug, tell her everything will be all right, then give her a kick up the arse and tell her to snap out of it.
Even more sadly, at least for Clive, who is broken-hearted, is Cindy’s elopement. It turns out that not only did Cindy have Clive, plus his Chinese rival in Harbin (a businessman her family wanted her to marry but whom she refused), but she also had a third man, her first love who lives in Beijing, and it was to him she ran when things got too much for her. She moved in with her old flame, found a job in sales, hated it, quit, and is now, according to Rina, as unhappy as ever, as she's feeling guilty and missing her family, but is too proud to come home.
My nemesis Danny is now our main minder. He acts the part of welcoming host, but seems anxious to get rid of us as quickly as possible when the work is done. Long gone are the nights out and the dancing at Happy Sundays, a distant memory the staggering back at five in the morning to awaken the sleepy night porter at the Overlook Hotel. And yet, after class, Danny still says, 'See you in two weeks,' and we find ourselves pressured into agreeing to just one more weekend. We have to sign our names on pay slips now, which Danny keeps in a locked drawer, and we wonder if, in the future, we ever say 'no' to working in Wuchang, will he use this evidence, and his contacts at the college, to make our lives difficult there? A dangerous game, but one we went into quite willingly, so can't really complain about.
That Sunday morning Clive opened the curtains and we looked out onto the low-rise mess of the little town to find it covered in three inches of red sand, a storm the night before having come in from the Gobi desert and enveloped the place. Cars, bikes, rooftops, pavements, balconies, streets and walls, all covered in red sand and enveloped and strange and alien, like a scene from Mars.
Song Feng Shan
The foreign teachers, including three new recruits, a pithy Brummie called Jim, and Sarah and Jane, two Liverpudlian girls of Cantonese Chinese ethnicity, and to whom taxi drivers continuously speak Mandarin, without realising they don't understand a word, piled onto the old school bus to find a store of boxes of cold chicken burgers, cartons of yoghurt and bottles of water. We had been invited (ordered?) to go on a school trip to the mountains of Song Feng Shan. This had never happened before in my time here, and I wondered if there was an ulterior motive. Perhaps Charles and Susan wanted us to see their human side. Perhaps they wanted to show the new teachers how jolly and fun working at the college can be. Perhaps they just wanted us hard-working teachers to relax. Depends what spin you put on it.
After an hour and a half's bus ride, we found ourselves in tiny country villages with tin-roofed concrete huts and dirty children, the huge bare mountains looming darkly in the distance under the clearest of blue skies. The driver kept getting us lost down dirt tracks while Tam, Anita and I bounced up and down painfully on the back seat. It got more painful on arrival, however: Charles, that nervous, ingratiating man put on an air of patronising patrician benevolence, expostulating over the area's history like a lord of the manor; Susan, his stick-thin wife, held his arm and simpered; Gina, frighteningly, morphed into a sixteen-stone cheerleader. Our bosses had a forced air of jollity that, quite frankly, made me queasy.
We walked to the four viewpoints on the mountain peaks, metal railings to stop us falling off the huge boulders stacked up like crumbling dry-stone dykes built long ago by giants. Tiny settlements lay like specks of gathered dust way below, dwarfed by the sheer blue canopy of sky above. The mountains sang a breezy siren's song. I left the group along with Ken and Jim to do some exploring. We spent the rest of the day discovering the alternative peaks, where there were no paths, no railings, just incredibly steep ascents you dragged yourself up, using tree roots and tufts of dried grass. A fresh, airy feeling of freedom and optimism blew around us all afternoon. At the top of our climbs, we sat on massive, smooth rock deposits, bigger than houses, and set the school, the country, the world to rights. White butterflies played intricate aerial patterns above our heads, blue woodpeckers scuttled up trunks and tapped and tapped, kestrels hovered above us in the cloudless sky; the school, China, the world, may be changing, but on Song Feng Shan time stood still.
After an hour and a half's bus ride, we found ourselves in tiny country villages with tin-roofed concrete huts and dirty children, the huge bare mountains looming darkly in the distance under the clearest of blue skies. The driver kept getting us lost down dirt tracks while Tam, Anita and I bounced up and down painfully on the back seat. It got more painful on arrival, however: Charles, that nervous, ingratiating man put on an air of patronising patrician benevolence, expostulating over the area's history like a lord of the manor; Susan, his stick-thin wife, held his arm and simpered; Gina, frighteningly, morphed into a sixteen-stone cheerleader. Our bosses had a forced air of jollity that, quite frankly, made me queasy.
We walked to the four viewpoints on the mountain peaks, metal railings to stop us falling off the huge boulders stacked up like crumbling dry-stone dykes built long ago by giants. Tiny settlements lay like specks of gathered dust way below, dwarfed by the sheer blue canopy of sky above. The mountains sang a breezy siren's song. I left the group along with Ken and Jim to do some exploring. We spent the rest of the day discovering the alternative peaks, where there were no paths, no railings, just incredibly steep ascents you dragged yourself up, using tree roots and tufts of dried grass. A fresh, airy feeling of freedom and optimism blew around us all afternoon. At the top of our climbs, we sat on massive, smooth rock deposits, bigger than houses, and set the school, the country, the world to rights. White butterflies played intricate aerial patterns above our heads, blue woodpeckers scuttled up trunks and tapped and tapped, kestrels hovered above us in the cloudless sky; the school, China, the world, may be changing, but on Song Feng Shan time stood still.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Back to Harbin
March 2002
Charles sits at the head of the long wooden table, grinning nervously, Gina sitting to his left, his wife Susan to his right, like the ugly faithful monsters - half dog, half dragon - that sit either side of temple gates to ward off evil spirits. They have their work cut out; there are plenty malevolent spirits in this room, myself included. Charles, tongue-tied as ever, coughs and tries to summon up the courage to tackle a difficult subject directly.
'Just because Karen has, well, left,' he begins, 'does not mean you should be feeling, umm, insecure.'
Karen, our Director of Studies, had done a runner and was never coming back. Weirdly, we should have known. She'd mysteriously turned up the day before Chinese New Year's eve in a Beijing park we were visiting, saying a peremptory hello, before slinking off with Danuka, who had become a close friend, for a pow-wow. At the time, I was too busy both flirting with Marina and psyching myself up to eat a stick of barbequed scorpions, to think much about it. Later, Danuka, obviously sworn to secrecy, refused to tell us what was going on, and her fearsome temper procluded further investigations.
Whatever, obviously the pressure of trying to keep us demanding teachers happy whilst dealing with the cloak-and-dagger politics of the college had got to Karen in the end. Often in team meetings she would raise her hands in exasperation and say, 'Look, don't blame me, I know it's a stupid idea but...' And we never did blame her.
'From now on,' Charles continues, 'your new Director of Studies will be Susan, my wife. If you have any academic questions, go to her. She will also be in charge of your schedules and of maintaining academic quality. Give her your full co-operation.'
The definition of 'nepotism' is:-
'Using your power or influence to obtain good jobs or unfair advantages for members of your own family'.
Susan then made a speech about how hard she was going to work and how hard she wanted us to work in return. She was looking forward to a harmonious future relationship with her foreign teachers. All said through lips as thin as a hair's breadth, and with a hard look in her cold eyes.
'On the logistics side, if you need anything, you can ask Gina. She will now be my assistant, and Head of the Foreign Department.'
The definition of 'cronyism' is:-
'A partiality to long-standing friends, especially by appointing them to positions of authority, regardless of their qualifications. Hence, cronyism is contrary in practice and principle to meritocracy. Cronyism exists when the appointer and the beneficiary are in social contact; often, the appointer is inadequate to hold his or her own job or position of authority, and for this reason the appointer appoints individuals who will not try to weaken him or her, or express views contrary to those of the appointer.'
Gina beamed victoriously, like a queen rightfully restored to her throne.
A most unholy triumvirate, made worse by the lack, the emptiness, of the 5th Floor lounge and teacher's office. Not only Karen has gone, but J, Albert and Paul too. The teachers are now being so slave-driven by Susan we have no time to relax in the lounge. Susan has moved out all the Chinese teachers whose first subject is not English from the office, and sometimes it's just Ronald, Ken, Patrick and I rattling about that big room with a few older Chinese who, strangely, can't speak any English. Every day a few of the old women put a foot up on the radiator to stretch their hamstrings out, or skip wildly in the middle of the floor, making the whole office vibrate.
As all this political wrangling goes on behind the scenes, I just concentrate on my teaching. Amazingly, I begin to find myself quite good at it. I see marked progress in my students' English - and attidude - despite the fact that they're now being bombarded with test after test, and forced to study an Upper Intermediate book which is way too hard for them. I've told my new DoS about this but, as Susan was the one who chose the textbook, there's no chance it'll be changed.
I'm giving up two of my evenings every week to help the students who need it catch up on their work. This college may be no meritocracy, but I'm damn sure my classroom will be.
Charles sits at the head of the long wooden table, grinning nervously, Gina sitting to his left, his wife Susan to his right, like the ugly faithful monsters - half dog, half dragon - that sit either side of temple gates to ward off evil spirits. They have their work cut out; there are plenty malevolent spirits in this room, myself included. Charles, tongue-tied as ever, coughs and tries to summon up the courage to tackle a difficult subject directly.
'Just because Karen has, well, left,' he begins, 'does not mean you should be feeling, umm, insecure.'
Karen, our Director of Studies, had done a runner and was never coming back. Weirdly, we should have known. She'd mysteriously turned up the day before Chinese New Year's eve in a Beijing park we were visiting, saying a peremptory hello, before slinking off with Danuka, who had become a close friend, for a pow-wow. At the time, I was too busy both flirting with Marina and psyching myself up to eat a stick of barbequed scorpions, to think much about it. Later, Danuka, obviously sworn to secrecy, refused to tell us what was going on, and her fearsome temper procluded further investigations.
Whatever, obviously the pressure of trying to keep us demanding teachers happy whilst dealing with the cloak-and-dagger politics of the college had got to Karen in the end. Often in team meetings she would raise her hands in exasperation and say, 'Look, don't blame me, I know it's a stupid idea but...' And we never did blame her.
'From now on,' Charles continues, 'your new Director of Studies will be Susan, my wife. If you have any academic questions, go to her. She will also be in charge of your schedules and of maintaining academic quality. Give her your full co-operation.'
The definition of 'nepotism' is:-
'Using your power or influence to obtain good jobs or unfair advantages for members of your own family'.
Susan then made a speech about how hard she was going to work and how hard she wanted us to work in return. She was looking forward to a harmonious future relationship with her foreign teachers. All said through lips as thin as a hair's breadth, and with a hard look in her cold eyes.
'On the logistics side, if you need anything, you can ask Gina. She will now be my assistant, and Head of the Foreign Department.'
The definition of 'cronyism' is:-
'A partiality to long-standing friends, especially by appointing them to positions of authority, regardless of their qualifications. Hence, cronyism is contrary in practice and principle to meritocracy. Cronyism exists when the appointer and the beneficiary are in social contact; often, the appointer is inadequate to hold his or her own job or position of authority, and for this reason the appointer appoints individuals who will not try to weaken him or her, or express views contrary to those of the appointer.'
Gina beamed victoriously, like a queen rightfully restored to her throne.
A most unholy triumvirate, made worse by the lack, the emptiness, of the 5th Floor lounge and teacher's office. Not only Karen has gone, but J, Albert and Paul too. The teachers are now being so slave-driven by Susan we have no time to relax in the lounge. Susan has moved out all the Chinese teachers whose first subject is not English from the office, and sometimes it's just Ronald, Ken, Patrick and I rattling about that big room with a few older Chinese who, strangely, can't speak any English. Every day a few of the old women put a foot up on the radiator to stretch their hamstrings out, or skip wildly in the middle of the floor, making the whole office vibrate.
As all this political wrangling goes on behind the scenes, I just concentrate on my teaching. Amazingly, I begin to find myself quite good at it. I see marked progress in my students' English - and attidude - despite the fact that they're now being bombarded with test after test, and forced to study an Upper Intermediate book which is way too hard for them. I've told my new DoS about this but, as Susan was the one who chose the textbook, there's no chance it'll be changed.
I'm giving up two of my evenings every week to help the students who need it catch up on their work. This college may be no meritocracy, but I'm damn sure my classroom will be.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Dalian
25/02/02
Dalian is big, clean, modern, and full of attitude. Gone are the wide-eyed stares of the Yellow River country bumpkins. In Dalian, the people are as modern and tall as the tall, modern buildings they inhabit; the girls, especially, are well dressed, sexy and way too occupied with themselves to stop and stare at just another bunch of scruffy foreign backpackers. They're too busy getting their hair done, or eating, or chatting, or just being cool.
The city is said to resemble the profile of a tiger, the eye of the tiger being Zhongshan Square, which is the hub and crux of the city, although not really a square, actually circular, eye-like, a huge roundabout from which a bunch of side-streets, home to hairdressers, hardware stores, ice-cream parlours, seafood restaurants, bars, nightclubs, coffee shops, banks, bus depots, hotels and fast food takeaways, branch off. We amuse ourselves in laid-back fashion during the day by walking about these busy streets, then return to them at night to eat and drink. It's all we have the energy to do now. A quiet end to a manic holiday. A winding down. It began at breakneck speed, like the fastest bus ride you've ever been on, and has ended like a pensioner's stroll in the park.
We're knackered. We need a holiday from our holiday. We're sick and tired of hotel rooms and filthy jam-packed trains, had enough of noodle shacks and blocked-up toilet drains. We don't have any clean clothes any more. I'm looking forward to getting back to Harbin, meeting up with the others, and comparing travel stories. We've certainly got a few.
One story I'm going to keep to myself was trying to cross Zhongshan Road this afternoon. The road, the main artery into Zhongshan Square, is the widest, busiest and noisiest in the city, so chock-a-block with traffic that it's virtually impossible to cross over-ground. This is where the underground markets come in. Similar to the underground market in Harbin, but on a smaller scale, dank, white-tiled passages are flanked by cheap shops on either side, forming a sweaty, smelly, noisy, colourful maze underneath the city centre roads. Perhaps only in China, when you simply want to cross a road, you have to go window shopping.
Danuka and Tam are at the hotel; I've popped out for one last bit of wandering before our we leave. I'm trying to get back to the hotel, but it's proving more difficult than I'd thought. The trouble is, I can't read the signs that hang from the ceilings of the underground passageways. I presume they're streetnames, or directions north, south, east and west; or something. Who knows? Stupidly, I follow my instincts. It's a straight road, I can't really go wrong... can I? Go down the steps, enter the noisy, colourful corridors, walk striaght, oh, left here then, umm, nice jeans, should I try... no, better not, oh, turn right here, no choice, follow your nose, ugh, no don't, where the hell am I? Aha! A ray of light. Here we go... and up... and... what the..? I'm on the same side of the road I started on.
I go back down, follow the passageways, come back out into the crisp air and traffic noise, and find myself in the same place. Twice. It takes me thirty minutes. I decide to wait for a lull in the traffic and then leg it over-ground across the road. I wait about ten minutes. There's a chance. I clamber over the barrier, jump down onto the tarmac, and suddenly my ears are screaming. A little guy in an orange vest is bolting towards me, blowing a whistle like an angry football referee. He stands beside me, not shouting, but whistling, his arms moving frantically, shooing me off the road and back onto the pavement. I climb back over the barrier and get scornful looks from two incredibly tall, skinny, gorgeous women who are walking past.
I go back down again, follow the passageways, taking different turns from the last time, or at least I think I am, but still I emerge into the early afternoon glare at the very same place where I started from! I assess my chances of running across the road, but the guy in the orange vest spots me, shakes his head, and puts his whistle to his lips. I go back down into the market, get totally lost, find a passage I know, and again emerge at the exact same point. It's been nearly an hour now! An hour to cross a road! This is ridiculous. I decide to make a break for it. I wait for another lull in the traffic, clamber back over the barrier, hear the peeps of the whistle, look up, see the little guy running towards me, look both ways, and sprint across the road. The whistler starts running after me, his whistles turning into shredded, gasping peeps as he puffs and pants behind me. Phee! Phee! Phee!
I reach the other side, climb over the barrier, look back, and see the whistler shaking his fist at me comically, then I walk away fast.
As I write, Tam and I are in a little tearoom, near the red-light area we got drunk in a few nights ago, uphill from the hotel. We must look like two satiated old men, who've seen and done it all and shall take no more part in the world. All we want is our teapot regularly filled. In the words of Thom Yorke: No alarms, and no surprises. Please. The tearoom is a traditional affair of mild greens and browns, the walls bedecked by vases, china horses, and other such ornaments, perched on split-level monkey-puzzle shelves. Each table is home to a cut-glass bowl of soft satin red and green flowers. Comfortably cushioned wooden chairs and green and white chequered tablecloths are our only companions in here, save the polite and helpful waitresses in green aprons.
We were on perhaps our fourth or fifth pot of green tea when, a few minutes ago, there was a power cut. We sat in the semi-darkness, in the deepening dusk of our holiday, and hardly noticed. As the kind, attentive waitresses panicked around us, we sat unperturbed in the gloom. Today has the feeling of 'home-time'. The lights have gone out. Time for bed.
26/02/02
Fireworks
It was the last night of the Spring Festival, and the locals were out celebrating. So Danuka and I stayed in.
Danuka has a pathological fear of explosions, which, having lived so long in Belfast is understandable enough. When we're outside, and someone sets off firecrackers, she jumps two feet in the air then curses them in seven different languages. Dalian was a war zone of fireworks, firecrackers, homemade bombs and colourful light. I watched it for a while from our eighth floor window. Tam went home tonight. It's just Danuka and I, trying to eke out our holiday by one more day. She suggested we get some beer in.
The fireworks continued long into the night. The next morning, they were still spinning through my head, flashes of light and colour, flashes of fireworks.
Dalian is big, clean, modern, and full of attitude. Gone are the wide-eyed stares of the Yellow River country bumpkins. In Dalian, the people are as modern and tall as the tall, modern buildings they inhabit; the girls, especially, are well dressed, sexy and way too occupied with themselves to stop and stare at just another bunch of scruffy foreign backpackers. They're too busy getting their hair done, or eating, or chatting, or just being cool.
The city is said to resemble the profile of a tiger, the eye of the tiger being Zhongshan Square, which is the hub and crux of the city, although not really a square, actually circular, eye-like, a huge roundabout from which a bunch of side-streets, home to hairdressers, hardware stores, ice-cream parlours, seafood restaurants, bars, nightclubs, coffee shops, banks, bus depots, hotels and fast food takeaways, branch off. We amuse ourselves in laid-back fashion during the day by walking about these busy streets, then return to them at night to eat and drink. It's all we have the energy to do now. A quiet end to a manic holiday. A winding down. It began at breakneck speed, like the fastest bus ride you've ever been on, and has ended like a pensioner's stroll in the park.
We're knackered. We need a holiday from our holiday. We're sick and tired of hotel rooms and filthy jam-packed trains, had enough of noodle shacks and blocked-up toilet drains. We don't have any clean clothes any more. I'm looking forward to getting back to Harbin, meeting up with the others, and comparing travel stories. We've certainly got a few.
One story I'm going to keep to myself was trying to cross Zhongshan Road this afternoon. The road, the main artery into Zhongshan Square, is the widest, busiest and noisiest in the city, so chock-a-block with traffic that it's virtually impossible to cross over-ground. This is where the underground markets come in. Similar to the underground market in Harbin, but on a smaller scale, dank, white-tiled passages are flanked by cheap shops on either side, forming a sweaty, smelly, noisy, colourful maze underneath the city centre roads. Perhaps only in China, when you simply want to cross a road, you have to go window shopping.
Danuka and Tam are at the hotel; I've popped out for one last bit of wandering before our we leave. I'm trying to get back to the hotel, but it's proving more difficult than I'd thought. The trouble is, I can't read the signs that hang from the ceilings of the underground passageways. I presume they're streetnames, or directions north, south, east and west; or something. Who knows? Stupidly, I follow my instincts. It's a straight road, I can't really go wrong... can I? Go down the steps, enter the noisy, colourful corridors, walk striaght, oh, left here then, umm, nice jeans, should I try... no, better not, oh, turn right here, no choice, follow your nose, ugh, no don't, where the hell am I? Aha! A ray of light. Here we go... and up... and... what the..? I'm on the same side of the road I started on.
I go back down, follow the passageways, come back out into the crisp air and traffic noise, and find myself in the same place. Twice. It takes me thirty minutes. I decide to wait for a lull in the traffic and then leg it over-ground across the road. I wait about ten minutes. There's a chance. I clamber over the barrier, jump down onto the tarmac, and suddenly my ears are screaming. A little guy in an orange vest is bolting towards me, blowing a whistle like an angry football referee. He stands beside me, not shouting, but whistling, his arms moving frantically, shooing me off the road and back onto the pavement. I climb back over the barrier and get scornful looks from two incredibly tall, skinny, gorgeous women who are walking past.
I go back down again, follow the passageways, taking different turns from the last time, or at least I think I am, but still I emerge into the early afternoon glare at the very same place where I started from! I assess my chances of running across the road, but the guy in the orange vest spots me, shakes his head, and puts his whistle to his lips. I go back down into the market, get totally lost, find a passage I know, and again emerge at the exact same point. It's been nearly an hour now! An hour to cross a road! This is ridiculous. I decide to make a break for it. I wait for another lull in the traffic, clamber back over the barrier, hear the peeps of the whistle, look up, see the little guy running towards me, look both ways, and sprint across the road. The whistler starts running after me, his whistles turning into shredded, gasping peeps as he puffs and pants behind me. Phee! Phee! Phee!
I reach the other side, climb over the barrier, look back, and see the whistler shaking his fist at me comically, then I walk away fast.
As I write, Tam and I are in a little tearoom, near the red-light area we got drunk in a few nights ago, uphill from the hotel. We must look like two satiated old men, who've seen and done it all and shall take no more part in the world. All we want is our teapot regularly filled. In the words of Thom Yorke: No alarms, and no surprises. Please. The tearoom is a traditional affair of mild greens and browns, the walls bedecked by vases, china horses, and other such ornaments, perched on split-level monkey-puzzle shelves. Each table is home to a cut-glass bowl of soft satin red and green flowers. Comfortably cushioned wooden chairs and green and white chequered tablecloths are our only companions in here, save the polite and helpful waitresses in green aprons.
We were on perhaps our fourth or fifth pot of green tea when, a few minutes ago, there was a power cut. We sat in the semi-darkness, in the deepening dusk of our holiday, and hardly noticed. As the kind, attentive waitresses panicked around us, we sat unperturbed in the gloom. Today has the feeling of 'home-time'. The lights have gone out. Time for bed.
26/02/02
Fireworks
It was the last night of the Spring Festival, and the locals were out celebrating. So Danuka and I stayed in.
Danuka has a pathological fear of explosions, which, having lived so long in Belfast is understandable enough. When we're outside, and someone sets off firecrackers, she jumps two feet in the air then curses them in seven different languages. Dalian was a war zone of fireworks, firecrackers, homemade bombs and colourful light. I watched it for a while from our eighth floor window. Tam went home tonight. It's just Danuka and I, trying to eke out our holiday by one more day. She suggested we get some beer in.
The fireworks continued long into the night. The next morning, they were still spinning through my head, flashes of light and colour, flashes of fireworks.
Monday, November 17, 2008
My Faith in Humanity Restored
It was three in the morning and we jumped into the first taxi we could find. We showed the driver the leaflet we'd picked up for the Dalian Youth Hostel, grudgingly agreed to a price of thirty Yuan, and were whisked off into the darkness at breakneck speed. After ten minutes on the highway, he pulled over to the side of the road for no apparent reason. We looked at each other uncertainly. The driver then took his mobile from his pocket, pointing to his watch then to the leaflet for the youth hostel. Quite sensibly, he'd decided to phone ahead to find out if the place was still open. It wasn't. Someone, probably the night watchman, answered the phone, but refused to let us in. We'd have to wait until nine o'clock in the morning.
Without another word, the driver gunned the engine and sent the car hurtling towards the bright lights of Dalian. As he drove through the city centre, he even gave us, tour guide style, a running commentary on the major sights. Not that we understood any of it. For all his good sense, the driver did, however, overestimate our wealth. The first hotel we stopped at was five-star and, on hearing the price of a room from the sleepy night-receptionist, I immediately had us walking out back to the taxi. Way above our price range! On realising this, the driver then made it his mission to get us the best deal possible on a Dalian hotel at 3.30 in the morning. We toured the city remorselessly, stopping at hotel after hotel. The driver and I would go in, knock on the reception desk to awaken the sleeping night staff, then the driver would haggle with them for a few minutes. If he thought we were being over-charged, he'd grab my arm and lead me out of the hotel swearing under his breath. There was one priceless moment when, after the driver had tapped ever louder on the desk with a pen, the drowsy little girl behind it lifted her head by degrees, hair, forehead, eyes half-shut, nose, sour mouth, pert chin, appearing in staccato segments from beneath the counter. She looked at us uncomprehendingly then asked us what we wanted. 'What do you think we want?' asked the driver, who looked at me then burst out laughing. He eventually found us a clean, affordable three-star hotel not five minutes from the city centre, which was still a little above our usual Spartan budget, but for a good morning's sleep we weren't complaining. He shook our hands with a beatific air of satisfaction, and refused to accept any more than the thirty Yuan we'd agreed upon beforehand. I glanced furtively at the meter, and saw that it was over fifty.
Our emotional journey, inner as well as outer, in that it comprised of a sea change in our outlook from cynical mistrustful backpackers to hippies with a true love of humankind, wasn't over yet. The next day, we decided to head to a place along the coast, of which our guidebook gave a good review (i.e. cheap and clean). We did like the place we were in, the Dalian Baolian, but really couldn't afford it. We asked the pretty young girls in blue blazers at reception for directions and, considering we were leaving their place to spend our money elsewhere, it really was nice of the manager to come out his office and offer to drive us there in the hotel mini-bus. We accepted gratefully. Twenty minutes later, we are standing in the lobby of this new place arguing with a woman, who ironically speaks excellent English, about their recently adopted policy of No Foreigners Allowed. The argument went something like this:
'No foreigners allowed? Why?'
'No why.'
'But what's wrong with us?'
'Nothing.'
'So why aren’t we allowed?'
'No why.'
Out of desperation, we asked the Baolian manager if he could drive us to the Dalian Youth Hostel. He could, he told us, but the youth hostel wouldn't accept us either. This didn't make sense, but sometimes it's better to relax, go with the flow, and see what happens, than start a fight. This was the right thing to do. We were taken back to the hotel where, after half an hour's tough negotiations, I'd got the price of our room down by more than half, and felt very proud of myself. Sixty Yuan per night, for a three-star hotel! The manager even threw in breakfast, offered to book us train tickets back to Harbin, and drive us personally to the station. What a guy. I inwardly high-fived the taxi driver who had, purely through a stubborn will not to see us ripped off, taken us to this lovely little hotel. For the first time on our travels, we felt like we'd got a proper bargain, instead of being ripped off because we were westerners. And we almost felt guilty.
Tam wanted to go shopping. Danuka wanted to wander along the cliffs. We negotiated the rest of our day in the middle of a street to the accompaniment of a band of singers, drummers and cymbalists, dressed in bright green, blue and red traditional clothes, celebrating the winding down of Chinese New Year the only way they knew how: noisily. Sick and tired, I plumped for the sea, leaving Tam to fend for himself. Danuka and I took a bus to Tiger Beach and walked from there all the way to the south side of the city. It took three or four hours and added new layers of tiredness to my legs, which began to stiffen up with lactic acid, but it was worth it. The coast road follows the curves and twists of the sheer, impressive cliffs, and provides a fantastic view of the Yellow Sea down below, dotted with numerous little island outcrops. The beaches are clean, white, mellow, quiet, probably because to get down to them entails a steep dangerous slide of two or three hundred feet. Small groups of pot-bellied middle-aged men were stripping off to take a bollocks-constricting swim in the cold water. A couple had annexed one beach for their marriage photo-party, the bride surreally strutting about the cold sand in full white dress and veil. The islands lay in the green effervescent sea like sleeping curled-up animals and, as the day wore on and the light faded, they seemed to shimmer and float like ghostly Laputias in the gloom.
That evening Tam and I went, as usual, for dinner and beer. It had become customary for us to sample the local beer of each new province we entered (Dalian is in Liaoning province). During the evening we encountered a filthy unwashed madman in long coat and beanie hat, who stared menacingly at us through the big restaurant window as we ate, really putting us off our shrimps, then jumped out at us as we left, making us nearly shit ourselves; a cute barmaid in a bar aptly named 'Happy Smile', who phoned up her English teacher for me to chat to, telling us as she did so that she was a really bad student (her teacher agreed); and another barmaid, drop-dead sexy rather than cute, in a warren of back-streets full of brothels, the bar a country and western pastiche with fake wooden panelling and red lampshades where the girls wore cowboy hats, the barmaid a short-skirted, gravel-voiced goddess called Sun Xin (pronounced: soon sheen), who asked us for the phone number of our hotel and promised she’d give us a ring, but didn't.
Without another word, the driver gunned the engine and sent the car hurtling towards the bright lights of Dalian. As he drove through the city centre, he even gave us, tour guide style, a running commentary on the major sights. Not that we understood any of it. For all his good sense, the driver did, however, overestimate our wealth. The first hotel we stopped at was five-star and, on hearing the price of a room from the sleepy night-receptionist, I immediately had us walking out back to the taxi. Way above our price range! On realising this, the driver then made it his mission to get us the best deal possible on a Dalian hotel at 3.30 in the morning. We toured the city remorselessly, stopping at hotel after hotel. The driver and I would go in, knock on the reception desk to awaken the sleeping night staff, then the driver would haggle with them for a few minutes. If he thought we were being over-charged, he'd grab my arm and lead me out of the hotel swearing under his breath. There was one priceless moment when, after the driver had tapped ever louder on the desk with a pen, the drowsy little girl behind it lifted her head by degrees, hair, forehead, eyes half-shut, nose, sour mouth, pert chin, appearing in staccato segments from beneath the counter. She looked at us uncomprehendingly then asked us what we wanted. 'What do you think we want?' asked the driver, who looked at me then burst out laughing. He eventually found us a clean, affordable three-star hotel not five minutes from the city centre, which was still a little above our usual Spartan budget, but for a good morning's sleep we weren't complaining. He shook our hands with a beatific air of satisfaction, and refused to accept any more than the thirty Yuan we'd agreed upon beforehand. I glanced furtively at the meter, and saw that it was over fifty.
Our emotional journey, inner as well as outer, in that it comprised of a sea change in our outlook from cynical mistrustful backpackers to hippies with a true love of humankind, wasn't over yet. The next day, we decided to head to a place along the coast, of which our guidebook gave a good review (i.e. cheap and clean). We did like the place we were in, the Dalian Baolian, but really couldn't afford it. We asked the pretty young girls in blue blazers at reception for directions and, considering we were leaving their place to spend our money elsewhere, it really was nice of the manager to come out his office and offer to drive us there in the hotel mini-bus. We accepted gratefully. Twenty minutes later, we are standing in the lobby of this new place arguing with a woman, who ironically speaks excellent English, about their recently adopted policy of No Foreigners Allowed. The argument went something like this:
'No foreigners allowed? Why?'
'No why.'
'But what's wrong with us?'
'Nothing.'
'So why aren’t we allowed?'
'No why.'
Out of desperation, we asked the Baolian manager if he could drive us to the Dalian Youth Hostel. He could, he told us, but the youth hostel wouldn't accept us either. This didn't make sense, but sometimes it's better to relax, go with the flow, and see what happens, than start a fight. This was the right thing to do. We were taken back to the hotel where, after half an hour's tough negotiations, I'd got the price of our room down by more than half, and felt very proud of myself. Sixty Yuan per night, for a three-star hotel! The manager even threw in breakfast, offered to book us train tickets back to Harbin, and drive us personally to the station. What a guy. I inwardly high-fived the taxi driver who had, purely through a stubborn will not to see us ripped off, taken us to this lovely little hotel. For the first time on our travels, we felt like we'd got a proper bargain, instead of being ripped off because we were westerners. And we almost felt guilty.
Tam wanted to go shopping. Danuka wanted to wander along the cliffs. We negotiated the rest of our day in the middle of a street to the accompaniment of a band of singers, drummers and cymbalists, dressed in bright green, blue and red traditional clothes, celebrating the winding down of Chinese New Year the only way they knew how: noisily. Sick and tired, I plumped for the sea, leaving Tam to fend for himself. Danuka and I took a bus to Tiger Beach and walked from there all the way to the south side of the city. It took three or four hours and added new layers of tiredness to my legs, which began to stiffen up with lactic acid, but it was worth it. The coast road follows the curves and twists of the sheer, impressive cliffs, and provides a fantastic view of the Yellow Sea down below, dotted with numerous little island outcrops. The beaches are clean, white, mellow, quiet, probably because to get down to them entails a steep dangerous slide of two or three hundred feet. Small groups of pot-bellied middle-aged men were stripping off to take a bollocks-constricting swim in the cold water. A couple had annexed one beach for their marriage photo-party, the bride surreally strutting about the cold sand in full white dress and veil. The islands lay in the green effervescent sea like sleeping curled-up animals and, as the day wore on and the light faded, they seemed to shimmer and float like ghostly Laputias in the gloom.
That evening Tam and I went, as usual, for dinner and beer. It had become customary for us to sample the local beer of each new province we entered (Dalian is in Liaoning province). During the evening we encountered a filthy unwashed madman in long coat and beanie hat, who stared menacingly at us through the big restaurant window as we ate, really putting us off our shrimps, then jumped out at us as we left, making us nearly shit ourselves; a cute barmaid in a bar aptly named 'Happy Smile', who phoned up her English teacher for me to chat to, telling us as she did so that she was a really bad student (her teacher agreed); and another barmaid, drop-dead sexy rather than cute, in a warren of back-streets full of brothels, the bar a country and western pastiche with fake wooden panelling and red lampshades where the girls wore cowboy hats, the barmaid a short-skirted, gravel-voiced goddess called Sun Xin (pronounced: soon sheen), who asked us for the phone number of our hotel and promised she’d give us a ring, but didn't.
The Ferry from Yantai
Travelling during the Spring Festival was really beginning to take its toll. The trains were routinely packed, and it was getting more and more difficult to find any tickets that weren't standing room only. We were regularly covering huge distances and usually at night, which disrupted our sleep patterns, which then in turn left our immune systems low. We were all getting sick, and really didn't need the two-hour wait in Qingdao train station’s ticket hall, where we did, however, manage to bag three hard seat tickets north to Yantai, from where we hoped to take a night boat to Dalian.
I was in pretty cheerful mood. I'd come to like Qingdao, with its narrow streets, yellow-brick houses, steep hills and interesting little DVD and clothes shops. My holiday budget had disappeared in a cool little shop called 'Old Skool Skatewear'. We never saw much of Yantai, going straight from the train to the ferry ticket office to book our boat. It was 8 pm as we lined up to catch the bus that the ferry company had laid on to take train passengers to the terminal. Just as we reached the front of the line, the driver shook his head, indicating the bus was full (a first in my experience in China). We were then infuriated to see him allow four or five more Chinese on.
We were pointed towards a second bus, which sat stationary and driverless. When the driver finally turned up, having finished his mah-jong or noodles, the queue had disintegrated into a scrum. Battle ensued around the opening doors of the bus, elbows, knees, fists, feet and rucksacks the weapons. One guy grabbed Danuka rudely and flung her out of the way. Then we attacked. Tam elbowed him in the stomach, I grabbed his shoulders and yanked him back, and Tash scraped her heel down his shin and stamped on his foot. Down he went, with a pained cry. Serves him right. After a ten minute drive, with five minutes to spare, we ran from the bus onto the ferry’s gangplank, and were, for some reason, ushered through to a room with plastic bucket seats nailed to the floor, where a movie on a big screen was playing at such volume that the distortion sounded like a wounded animal. We had to scream at each other as if we were on top of a mountain in a blizzard, before realising we were all saying the same thing: let's get out of here.
The boat was full to the gunnels. It was like cardboard city out on deck, where every inch of space had been marked out as 'ours' by huge families, ranging from wailing babies to grandparents, sheets, duvets, and other assorted bedding spread across the decks, defining colourful territory like a political map of small neighbouring countries. As we walked down corridors, we stepped over drunks, vomit, fighting children, an array of limbs, heads, bags and suitcases, men and women cooking, talking, drinking and playing cards. We finally found the ship's captain and, after Danuka had fluttered her prodigious eyelashes at him, were taken to a four-bunk cabin with a tiny black-and-white television that stubbornly refused to find a reception. No matter, we had beer and a bed. It was only when we had to stray out into the cramped corridors to visit the toilet, were we reminded of the uncomfortable boat people packed together all around us, our cabin a quiet island amongst raging seas.
I was in pretty cheerful mood. I'd come to like Qingdao, with its narrow streets, yellow-brick houses, steep hills and interesting little DVD and clothes shops. My holiday budget had disappeared in a cool little shop called 'Old Skool Skatewear'. We never saw much of Yantai, going straight from the train to the ferry ticket office to book our boat. It was 8 pm as we lined up to catch the bus that the ferry company had laid on to take train passengers to the terminal. Just as we reached the front of the line, the driver shook his head, indicating the bus was full (a first in my experience in China). We were then infuriated to see him allow four or five more Chinese on.
We were pointed towards a second bus, which sat stationary and driverless. When the driver finally turned up, having finished his mah-jong or noodles, the queue had disintegrated into a scrum. Battle ensued around the opening doors of the bus, elbows, knees, fists, feet and rucksacks the weapons. One guy grabbed Danuka rudely and flung her out of the way. Then we attacked. Tam elbowed him in the stomach, I grabbed his shoulders and yanked him back, and Tash scraped her heel down his shin and stamped on his foot. Down he went, with a pained cry. Serves him right. After a ten minute drive, with five minutes to spare, we ran from the bus onto the ferry’s gangplank, and were, for some reason, ushered through to a room with plastic bucket seats nailed to the floor, where a movie on a big screen was playing at such volume that the distortion sounded like a wounded animal. We had to scream at each other as if we were on top of a mountain in a blizzard, before realising we were all saying the same thing: let's get out of here.
The boat was full to the gunnels. It was like cardboard city out on deck, where every inch of space had been marked out as 'ours' by huge families, ranging from wailing babies to grandparents, sheets, duvets, and other assorted bedding spread across the decks, defining colourful territory like a political map of small neighbouring countries. As we walked down corridors, we stepped over drunks, vomit, fighting children, an array of limbs, heads, bags and suitcases, men and women cooking, talking, drinking and playing cards. We finally found the ship's captain and, after Danuka had fluttered her prodigious eyelashes at him, were taken to a four-bunk cabin with a tiny black-and-white television that stubbornly refused to find a reception. No matter, we had beer and a bed. It was only when we had to stray out into the cramped corridors to visit the toilet, were we reminded of the uncomfortable boat people packed together all around us, our cabin a quiet island amongst raging seas.
Lao Shan
We took a mini-bus tour to the mountain range of which Lao Shan is the most famous and prominent peak. The next time, if there ever is one, I'd take a regular bus as, after the usual frustrating stops at souvenir shops (one of which was a dried fish emporium which stank putridly), and being hassled constantly by a skinny, bespectacled nerd of a guide with a yellow flag, who clapped his hands continuously crying 'Lai lai lai lai lai!', with a disproportionate sense of his own self-worth, we were left with only one and a half hours on the mountain itself, which isn't nearly enough.
In fact, the mountain range covers an impressive 400 square kilometres, and lies just over one hour (if you're not on a tour bus) from Qingdao, along the coast road of the narrow, stunning peninsula on which the city sits. Lao Shan, in ancient China, was believed to be the home of the Immortals. Apparently there used to be 72 temples dotted around the mountains here, but nearly all of them were razed to the ground during the Cultural Revolution. I formed an image in my mind of a bunch of uneducated teenage Red Guards running amok in the mountains, hell-bent on mindless destruction in honour of Mao, grabbing and smashing artefacts and treasures more ancient and important than they could ever imagine. I looked at my novelty Mao watch, and decided to smash it at the first opportunity.
We climbed rough stone steps which seemed to go on for so long we wouldn't have been surprised if we'd ended up in the clouds, bumping into a few of those old Immortal guys. The mountains are stunning, gnarled, knobbly, their bent, aged peaks seeming to nod and watch as you climb, as if the mountains are old men with a million secrets, and a knowledge you will never know. The summits are set off to spectacular effect by deep gorges, bamboo groves, trickling rivers and a hundred foot-high waterfall that drops into a deep pool over smoothed ivory-white sandstone. On either side of the paths up lie massive yellow boulders, perched precariously, as if at one touch of a finger you could start an avalanche of ten-tonne rocks. At the top of the first climb lies an old temple, perhaps left standing by the Red Guards in the knowledge that they would some day be able to charge an entrance fee to it from Capitalist Roaders and Foreign Devils.
We climbed on for another mile or so, the steps petering out to become a wild dirt path, then began to run out of time. We stopped at a huge boulder, flat as a tabletop, which we used as a viewpoint to take in the mountains and sea below. The sea had taken an azure sparkle that merged seamlessly in a pale, blurred, china-white horizon with the cloudless sunny sky. There were no other tourists here, no souvenir stalls. I didn't need any more Taoist trinkets or fake-gold smiling Buddha's. This was my temple: nature at its most awesome. I reflected that this was the first time since I'd arrived in China I'd been up a mountain with a view of the sea. The scene unfurled over me like a soft white sheet on a clean bed: warm sunshine, mountains, sea and peace, acres of space and fresh air between me and the dirty, over-populated, manic bustle of developing China.
In fact, the mountain range covers an impressive 400 square kilometres, and lies just over one hour (if you're not on a tour bus) from Qingdao, along the coast road of the narrow, stunning peninsula on which the city sits. Lao Shan, in ancient China, was believed to be the home of the Immortals. Apparently there used to be 72 temples dotted around the mountains here, but nearly all of them were razed to the ground during the Cultural Revolution. I formed an image in my mind of a bunch of uneducated teenage Red Guards running amok in the mountains, hell-bent on mindless destruction in honour of Mao, grabbing and smashing artefacts and treasures more ancient and important than they could ever imagine. I looked at my novelty Mao watch, and decided to smash it at the first opportunity.
We climbed rough stone steps which seemed to go on for so long we wouldn't have been surprised if we'd ended up in the clouds, bumping into a few of those old Immortal guys. The mountains are stunning, gnarled, knobbly, their bent, aged peaks seeming to nod and watch as you climb, as if the mountains are old men with a million secrets, and a knowledge you will never know. The summits are set off to spectacular effect by deep gorges, bamboo groves, trickling rivers and a hundred foot-high waterfall that drops into a deep pool over smoothed ivory-white sandstone. On either side of the paths up lie massive yellow boulders, perched precariously, as if at one touch of a finger you could start an avalanche of ten-tonne rocks. At the top of the first climb lies an old temple, perhaps left standing by the Red Guards in the knowledge that they would some day be able to charge an entrance fee to it from Capitalist Roaders and Foreign Devils.
We climbed on for another mile or so, the steps petering out to become a wild dirt path, then began to run out of time. We stopped at a huge boulder, flat as a tabletop, which we used as a viewpoint to take in the mountains and sea below. The sea had taken an azure sparkle that merged seamlessly in a pale, blurred, china-white horizon with the cloudless sunny sky. There were no other tourists here, no souvenir stalls. I didn't need any more Taoist trinkets or fake-gold smiling Buddha's. This was my temple: nature at its most awesome. I reflected that this was the first time since I'd arrived in China I'd been up a mountain with a view of the sea. The scene unfurled over me like a soft white sheet on a clean bed: warm sunshine, mountains, sea and peace, acres of space and fresh air between me and the dirty, over-populated, manic bustle of developing China.
Qingdao
Undone by insomnia, travel fatigue, dehydration, and a nasty chest, sinus and urinary infection-combo, I stared out at the sea as if looking at the shifting surface of another planet. It had been so long since I'd seen the sea I'd forgotten how alien it can look. Mist enshrouded it; seaweed skirted it; white gulls cried and swooped down into it; colours of briny-brown, mustard yellow, jade green, electric blue. I crunched down a pebble shell beach, took off shoes and socks, and stood in the shallows like a holidaying pensioner, the cold water pulling at my ankles and caressing my toes, then coughed up some of my own alien yellow substance and added it to the water.
The old district of Qingdao is a pretty jumble of various tasty influences, seemingly thrown together and stirred brusquely without recipe. There's a pier (Zhang Qiao), with a long wooden promenade like many English seaside resorts, except, unlike in Brighton or Weston Supermare, there's a pagoda at the end of it selling Chinese tourist junk (you can see it on the Tsingtao beer label). Rugged mountains in the background, sandstone and knobbly, provide the city with a horseshoe-shaped shelter, rather resembling Nice or Cannes on the Cote d'Azur. Battleships and submarines lie like cold dead fish on the surface of the water, which reminded me of The Hoe, in Plymouth. Add to that the fact that the Germans occupied the city for many years, giving it not just its famous Tsingtao beer, but also its old-town architecture - brash castles where the Governors once lived, surrounded by narrow streets of yellow sandstone houses with red roofs - before then being handed over to the Japanese after the Treaty of Versailles, then you can appreciate my confusion. Where, exactly, was I? I was still in China, I knew, because there were thousands of Chinese people all around me, many of whom still, reassuringly, came up to me, garbled 'Hahlaow!' then walked off laughing; but in many ways Qingdao did not resemble the China I knew, loved, and hated.
Was that a good or a bad thing?
A Strange Dream
That evening Danuka gave me some strange brown powder, along with bright green and yellow pills that looked like M&M's, alleging them to be full of calcium, vitamins and Chinese herbal remedies. I sank into a spluttering, stuttering sleep, having the strangest dreams, of which this is an example:
Tam and I are eating in a typically noisy Chinese restaurant. We're the only foreigners there. I'm tucking into one of my favourite dishes, beef noodles in chilli sauce. It's impossible to eat this dish without slurping it, making a nasty noise your mother would have told you off about as a child. On trains, at roadside stalls, or in restaurants all over China, however, it's a common noise:
'Sssssshhhhhhlllllleeeeeeooooooooo-puh!'
So I'm slurping and sucking my noodles, making a bit of a mess. However, every time I suck and slurp, every Chinese person in the restaurant starts tutting at me in a disapproving manner, shaking their heads and making faces at each other. This is making me really self-conscious. I try to eat my noodles silently, picking up a few strands at a time with my chopsticks then biting into them, but I still make a noise. I can't help it! And to cap it all, every Chinese in the place continues to spit and gob, clear their nasal passages with a howk onto the floor, and sook and slurp away until their hearts' content. Surely, if this is acceptable, then my slurping of noodles should not be criticized?
Worse is to come as Tam goes to the toilet. Now, toilets in China are nothing to write home about, not unless you're an Environmental Health officer on a busman's holiday, anyway. They are of the squat design, stink to high heaven, usually have filthy floors covered in human waste, paper and water, and brown disgusting stools stuck to the porcelain which the cleaner, if there is one at all, will need dynamite to shift. When Tam returns a few minutes later, the whole restaurant goes up in arms, complaining about the smell. They refuse to finish their meals, or even pay for them, threatening to walk out if something is not done about the horrible stench left by the foreigner. They accuse us of having no manners at all - we slurp our noodles rudely and leave a terrible smell in the toilets - all the time clearing their noses, spitting onto the linoleum and shouting at the top of their voices.
The old district of Qingdao is a pretty jumble of various tasty influences, seemingly thrown together and stirred brusquely without recipe. There's a pier (Zhang Qiao), with a long wooden promenade like many English seaside resorts, except, unlike in Brighton or Weston Supermare, there's a pagoda at the end of it selling Chinese tourist junk (you can see it on the Tsingtao beer label). Rugged mountains in the background, sandstone and knobbly, provide the city with a horseshoe-shaped shelter, rather resembling Nice or Cannes on the Cote d'Azur. Battleships and submarines lie like cold dead fish on the surface of the water, which reminded me of The Hoe, in Plymouth. Add to that the fact that the Germans occupied the city for many years, giving it not just its famous Tsingtao beer, but also its old-town architecture - brash castles where the Governors once lived, surrounded by narrow streets of yellow sandstone houses with red roofs - before then being handed over to the Japanese after the Treaty of Versailles, then you can appreciate my confusion. Where, exactly, was I? I was still in China, I knew, because there were thousands of Chinese people all around me, many of whom still, reassuringly, came up to me, garbled 'Hahlaow!' then walked off laughing; but in many ways Qingdao did not resemble the China I knew, loved, and hated.
Was that a good or a bad thing?
A Strange Dream
That evening Danuka gave me some strange brown powder, along with bright green and yellow pills that looked like M&M's, alleging them to be full of calcium, vitamins and Chinese herbal remedies. I sank into a spluttering, stuttering sleep, having the strangest dreams, of which this is an example:
Tam and I are eating in a typically noisy Chinese restaurant. We're the only foreigners there. I'm tucking into one of my favourite dishes, beef noodles in chilli sauce. It's impossible to eat this dish without slurping it, making a nasty noise your mother would have told you off about as a child. On trains, at roadside stalls, or in restaurants all over China, however, it's a common noise:
'Sssssshhhhhhlllllleeeeeeooooooooo-puh!'
So I'm slurping and sucking my noodles, making a bit of a mess. However, every time I suck and slurp, every Chinese person in the restaurant starts tutting at me in a disapproving manner, shaking their heads and making faces at each other. This is making me really self-conscious. I try to eat my noodles silently, picking up a few strands at a time with my chopsticks then biting into them, but I still make a noise. I can't help it! And to cap it all, every Chinese in the place continues to spit and gob, clear their nasal passages with a howk onto the floor, and sook and slurp away until their hearts' content. Surely, if this is acceptable, then my slurping of noodles should not be criticized?
Worse is to come as Tam goes to the toilet. Now, toilets in China are nothing to write home about, not unless you're an Environmental Health officer on a busman's holiday, anyway. They are of the squat design, stink to high heaven, usually have filthy floors covered in human waste, paper and water, and brown disgusting stools stuck to the porcelain which the cleaner, if there is one at all, will need dynamite to shift. When Tam returns a few minutes later, the whole restaurant goes up in arms, complaining about the smell. They refuse to finish their meals, or even pay for them, threatening to walk out if something is not done about the horrible stench left by the foreigner. They accuse us of having no manners at all - we slurp our noodles rudely and leave a terrible smell in the toilets - all the time clearing their noses, spitting onto the linoleum and shouting at the top of their voices.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Take Me to the River, Take Me to the Sea
When I woke up, the walls were undulating and the ceiling was spinning round in circles above my head. I had no idea where I was, and not just for a split second, but for whole minutes. I coughed, and a bright yellow gobbet flew from my mouth with bullet velocity.
Then I remembered the black beer and red peonies. Last night Tam and I had drunk the local brew in a strange dimly-lit basement bar. Henan's finest, it said on the label. Wouldn't like to drink the worst, if that's the finest. Picture of a sad-faced dog on the bottle (perhaps because that's how you look the day after), with the name May in large print. I smoked cigarettes from a bright red packet (the same colour as my throat this morning), on it a picture of peony flowers. These flowers have a special significance in China, something to do with an Empress who, jealous of their beauty, ordered them all destroyed. A good idea, and I wish she'd finished what she'd started.
Talk about starting badly and then going downhill from there. We actually went down-river. Today had weirdness written all over it. We were doomed from the moment we woke up. I blame the double-palindrome. Today's date is: 20.02.2002. Spooky times afoot. Which would explain why Danuka suddenly said:
'Let's go and see the Yellow River.'
Let me explain. This whole holiday Tam and I have done all the donkey work, the booking of train tickets, checking into hotels, route-planning, bus-finding hum-drum that takes up a lot of time when you're travelling on a budget. Danuka happily leaves all this to us, attesting that our Chinese is better than hers which, considering our Chinese is a few hackneyed sentences buttressed by The Lonely Planet Mandarin phrasebook, is a tenuous claim at best. We figure she's just lazy. Why jostle, push and fight for train tickets when you can get two guys to do it for you? However, if she doesn't like something, she's quick enough to complain about it. Anyway, she'd taken more initiative in those few seconds than she'd taken the whole holiday. And that worried us.
Being way too hung-over to object, however, it was to the Yellow River we went. To be fair, Danuka took the lead in the travel arrangements. She identified the number six bus as the one to take us to the viewing point outside Kaifeng but, after waiting at the stop for some time, we eventually found out that the route had been discontinued. At least, that's what we took the guy, waving his arms about, and saying 'No no no!' to mean. No bus? To a famous viewing point? Seemed strange, at the time. Danuka flagged down a taxi and eventually settled on the sum of fifty Yuan, there and back, with the driver. We got in, and found the vehicle bedecked in black leather, black curtains over the windows, and fake plastic flowers on the parcel shelf behind us. It was a funeral taxi, a hearse-chaser for hire. Alarm bells began to ring. From the gap in the black curtains, I watched black clouds gather in the sky, which suited my mood. I coughed and emitted more yellow stuff. Note to self: do not, on any account, let Danuka take the initiative, ever again.
After only ten minutes, the driver turns right off the main road, drives along a tree-lined path for a few hundred yards then stops. He shoos us out, promising to wait. Of course he'll wait: we haven't given him any of the extortionate fifty Yuan yet. We walk along the narrow road, flanked by statues, pagodas, trees, but for the life of us can't see any river. Are we really at the viewpoint? We're not sure, as a viewpoint generally necessitates a view, and there's absolutely nothing to see here. The taxi suddenly skids to a halt alongside us. The driver beckons us to get in. He lifts up a bottle of mineral water with just a drop left in it, shakes it, says:
'Mei you shui.'
Then bawls with laughter as if this is the funniest thing he's ever seen in his life. No water. Our Chinese was good enough to understand that. We didn't believe him. Surely this was some kind of practical joke. Kaifeng has an infamous history of being destroyed repeatedly by floods from the Yellow River. There must be some water somewhere. We made him take us back to the viewing point, which we'd already passed without knowing it. When we got out the cab and walked to the edge, it was just as he'd said. Mei you fucking shui. No water whatsoever, just a dry bed of silt. And that bastard had known all along.
We couldn't believe it: a viewing point to see a dry bed of silt. Right enough, there were no Chinese tour groups bouncing around with their two-fingered V-for-Victory signs, taking photos. Because who wants to take a photo of silt? Apart from us, who'd paid fifty Yuan for the pleasure. Tam and I looked at each other then burst out laughing. We didn't stop for maybe five minutes. In fact, this really was one of the funniest things we'd seen so far. This was the wrong, or maybe the right, thing to do, as Danuka didn't speak to us again all day.
One final ignominy remained. We asked the driver to take us back to our hotel, but instead he took us on a tour of Kaifeng housing estates, saying something like 'Don't worry, I know what I'm doing', before stopping outside a block of residential apartments down a narrow side-street. He pointed to himself to say that this was his house. He went in, then came back five minutes later, dragging what turned out to be his sister, a small, shy girl who he claimed was an English teacher. With her translating, badly, he then made us a proposition: he would take us to see some real water, at another viewpoint on the river, and it would cost us only another fifty Yuan! Pride in tatters, it was all we could do not to strangle him. But we couldn't strangle him, as we had no idea where we were, or how to get back to hotel.
The curse of the palindrome didn't end there. The train journey from Kaifeng to Qingdao that night proved to be just as nasty as the one from Luoyang, but one nightmare train journey in a travelogue is enough, I think. Strangely, just after midnight, palindrome mercifully over, we managed to upgrade our tickets from hard seats to hard sleepers (the term 'hard sleeper' does not sound too auspicious, but believe me when I say that these hard bunks had become some sort of holy grail to us by that time) and, after a mad dash along the length of the train, rucksacks bouncing painfully, when it had stopped at some hick station in some hick town, we got into our hard sleeper carriage and breathed a sigh of relief. Then couldn't sleep. Is it possible to be too tired to sleep? We were. As the train trundled slowly across the border of Henan and Shandong provinces, the promise of Qingdao, a seaside city, beaches, mountains, and our favourite beer beckoning, we sat up saucer-eyed, playing cards.
Then I remembered the black beer and red peonies. Last night Tam and I had drunk the local brew in a strange dimly-lit basement bar. Henan's finest, it said on the label. Wouldn't like to drink the worst, if that's the finest. Picture of a sad-faced dog on the bottle (perhaps because that's how you look the day after), with the name May in large print. I smoked cigarettes from a bright red packet (the same colour as my throat this morning), on it a picture of peony flowers. These flowers have a special significance in China, something to do with an Empress who, jealous of their beauty, ordered them all destroyed. A good idea, and I wish she'd finished what she'd started.
Talk about starting badly and then going downhill from there. We actually went down-river. Today had weirdness written all over it. We were doomed from the moment we woke up. I blame the double-palindrome. Today's date is: 20.02.2002. Spooky times afoot. Which would explain why Danuka suddenly said:
'Let's go and see the Yellow River.'
Let me explain. This whole holiday Tam and I have done all the donkey work, the booking of train tickets, checking into hotels, route-planning, bus-finding hum-drum that takes up a lot of time when you're travelling on a budget. Danuka happily leaves all this to us, attesting that our Chinese is better than hers which, considering our Chinese is a few hackneyed sentences buttressed by The Lonely Planet Mandarin phrasebook, is a tenuous claim at best. We figure she's just lazy. Why jostle, push and fight for train tickets when you can get two guys to do it for you? However, if she doesn't like something, she's quick enough to complain about it. Anyway, she'd taken more initiative in those few seconds than she'd taken the whole holiday. And that worried us.
Being way too hung-over to object, however, it was to the Yellow River we went. To be fair, Danuka took the lead in the travel arrangements. She identified the number six bus as the one to take us to the viewing point outside Kaifeng but, after waiting at the stop for some time, we eventually found out that the route had been discontinued. At least, that's what we took the guy, waving his arms about, and saying 'No no no!' to mean. No bus? To a famous viewing point? Seemed strange, at the time. Danuka flagged down a taxi and eventually settled on the sum of fifty Yuan, there and back, with the driver. We got in, and found the vehicle bedecked in black leather, black curtains over the windows, and fake plastic flowers on the parcel shelf behind us. It was a funeral taxi, a hearse-chaser for hire. Alarm bells began to ring. From the gap in the black curtains, I watched black clouds gather in the sky, which suited my mood. I coughed and emitted more yellow stuff. Note to self: do not, on any account, let Danuka take the initiative, ever again.
After only ten minutes, the driver turns right off the main road, drives along a tree-lined path for a few hundred yards then stops. He shoos us out, promising to wait. Of course he'll wait: we haven't given him any of the extortionate fifty Yuan yet. We walk along the narrow road, flanked by statues, pagodas, trees, but for the life of us can't see any river. Are we really at the viewpoint? We're not sure, as a viewpoint generally necessitates a view, and there's absolutely nothing to see here. The taxi suddenly skids to a halt alongside us. The driver beckons us to get in. He lifts up a bottle of mineral water with just a drop left in it, shakes it, says:
'Mei you shui.'
Then bawls with laughter as if this is the funniest thing he's ever seen in his life. No water. Our Chinese was good enough to understand that. We didn't believe him. Surely this was some kind of practical joke. Kaifeng has an infamous history of being destroyed repeatedly by floods from the Yellow River. There must be some water somewhere. We made him take us back to the viewing point, which we'd already passed without knowing it. When we got out the cab and walked to the edge, it was just as he'd said. Mei you fucking shui. No water whatsoever, just a dry bed of silt. And that bastard had known all along.
We couldn't believe it: a viewing point to see a dry bed of silt. Right enough, there were no Chinese tour groups bouncing around with their two-fingered V-for-Victory signs, taking photos. Because who wants to take a photo of silt? Apart from us, who'd paid fifty Yuan for the pleasure. Tam and I looked at each other then burst out laughing. We didn't stop for maybe five minutes. In fact, this really was one of the funniest things we'd seen so far. This was the wrong, or maybe the right, thing to do, as Danuka didn't speak to us again all day.
One final ignominy remained. We asked the driver to take us back to our hotel, but instead he took us on a tour of Kaifeng housing estates, saying something like 'Don't worry, I know what I'm doing', before stopping outside a block of residential apartments down a narrow side-street. He pointed to himself to say that this was his house. He went in, then came back five minutes later, dragging what turned out to be his sister, a small, shy girl who he claimed was an English teacher. With her translating, badly, he then made us a proposition: he would take us to see some real water, at another viewpoint on the river, and it would cost us only another fifty Yuan! Pride in tatters, it was all we could do not to strangle him. But we couldn't strangle him, as we had no idea where we were, or how to get back to hotel.
The curse of the palindrome didn't end there. The train journey from Kaifeng to Qingdao that night proved to be just as nasty as the one from Luoyang, but one nightmare train journey in a travelogue is enough, I think. Strangely, just after midnight, palindrome mercifully over, we managed to upgrade our tickets from hard seats to hard sleepers (the term 'hard sleeper' does not sound too auspicious, but believe me when I say that these hard bunks had become some sort of holy grail to us by that time) and, after a mad dash along the length of the train, rucksacks bouncing painfully, when it had stopped at some hick station in some hick town, we got into our hard sleeper carriage and breathed a sigh of relief. Then couldn't sleep. Is it possible to be too tired to sleep? We were. As the train trundled slowly across the border of Henan and Shandong provinces, the promise of Qingdao, a seaside city, beaches, mountains, and our favourite beer beckoning, we sat up saucer-eyed, playing cards.
Broken Chinglish
The Iron Pagoda Park was kissed with sunshine and held static by clear blue sky. A short bus journey out of the fortified walls takes you to this wide, green expanse of trees and grass. A mellow atmosphere and warm weather re-charged our motors and burned our faces. The Iron Pagoda isn't really iron, but stone. It gets its name because, from a distance on a sunny day, you can see it glow a deep burnished russet iron-red. Its decorative carved edges end in a sharp point which points to the heavens. It dominates the landscape as you walk through the park appearing in different forms, from different perspectives, towering angularly every which way you look.
What struck me most about the park, however, were the signs, translated into such amusingly bad English that sometimes you had no idea what they meant. The signs, be they rules, advice, instructions or warnings, were obviously transliterated directly from the Chinese into English by a person with a flowery imagination and terrible spelling and grammar. For example: Gutteral Relics; Meet and Guid Temp; Off Ice; Girth Aid; Tourist Complaining; and, my personal favourite, Big Sod. Here are the park rules, verbatim:
Sight Seeing Notice
- Tourists should obide the order Consciously while you are visiting the Iron Tower park.
- Peace buy tickets to go in park by line. Peace don't block the way.
- Peace keep the sanitation of the park. Peace don't spit, relive the bowels or throw rubbish as is your way in the park.
- Peace take care of cultura relic and pubic property. Don't doodle on the trees place of interest or pubic properties in the park.
- Peace take care of the flowers and grass. Peace keep off lawn and don't break flower or fruit.
- Peace take care of the order in the park. Don't senc out throwaway your dog shoot birds or catch them in the park. Don't lie on chair on bothsides of the park.
- Don't fight or bust up in the park. Don't gamble, do anything superstitious or anything that transgresses the law either.
- Peace don't throw anything that is easy to burn or explode in the park.
- Peace leave the park consciously on time. Don't cemo lish the walls of the park or be bivouacked in the park.
Sunday, November 9, 2008
Kaifeng
Kaifeng, one of the seven ancient capitals of China, sits precariously on the flood plains of the Yellow River. It has a difficult relationship with the river, which is simultaneously the city's benefactor, the waterways connecting Kaifeng with north, south and east, and its destroyer, repeated floods having razed the city to the ground on numerous occasions.
Like Xi'an, the old part of the city is situated within four fortified walls, and there are some lovely old streets. Shudian Jie is the main drag, a pretty old street lined with wonderful two-storied Qing Dynasty balconied houses, which are crafted with intricate wooden carvings and topped off with old-style pagoda roofs. The street plays host to a vibrant night market, full of clothes, jewellery and, especially, food stalls. The people of Kaifeng like to walk up and down, up and down Shudian Jie every night; it's the street to see and be seen on.
We walked through the market that night like zombies, barely taking any of it in. My memory is held firm at the edges by wooden Qing buildings, then in the middle is a complete blur: smoke and cooking smells; good-looking couples promenading; myriads of ancient bicycles heaped together; chairs upon chairs around low wooden tables; people eating, drinking, chatting; us somewhere in there too, wandering vacuously, silently. We decided to have a quiet few days and regroup, before heading to the busier metropolises of Qingdao and Dalian.
Like Xi'an, the old part of the city is situated within four fortified walls, and there are some lovely old streets. Shudian Jie is the main drag, a pretty old street lined with wonderful two-storied Qing Dynasty balconied houses, which are crafted with intricate wooden carvings and topped off with old-style pagoda roofs. The street plays host to a vibrant night market, full of clothes, jewellery and, especially, food stalls. The people of Kaifeng like to walk up and down, up and down Shudian Jie every night; it's the street to see and be seen on.
We walked through the market that night like zombies, barely taking any of it in. My memory is held firm at the edges by wooden Qing buildings, then in the middle is a complete blur: smoke and cooking smells; good-looking couples promenading; myriads of ancient bicycles heaped together; chairs upon chairs around low wooden tables; people eating, drinking, chatting; us somewhere in there too, wandering vacuously, silently. We decided to have a quiet few days and regroup, before heading to the busier metropolises of Qingdao and Dalian.
The Train to Kaifeng
Luoyang train station was brutal. Guards strutted up and down, barking orders at us through loud-halers from a distance of two feet. We were herded into long, straight queues, shouted at if we so much as put one foot out of line, then marched onto the platform like captured animals.
Then all hell broke loose.
The train only stopped at the platform for six minutes. Although the three of us were near the front of our queue, it became a battle of life or death to get on the train. The guards with the loud-halers had disappeared, leaving everyone to fight it out. The line-ups disintegrated into a jostling mob, pushing and shoving around the doors of the carriages. As I pulled myself up the ladder I had to stick my elbows into two people who were scrambling up the side-rails to get on before me. Another guy was hanging on to my big backpack, wrenching at it, trying to pull me off the ladder, my shoulder blades burning with the weight. I turned and punched him. There seemed nothing else I could do.
I managed to get on the train but didn't make it to a carriage. Around twenty people, including Tam, Danuka and I, were crushed into the small space between the two carriages, unable to move, sweating and groaning and wriggling painfully. In Harbin I had seen pigs on the caged back of a truck, squashed in so tight the poor animals around the edges had been crushed to death. That's what it felt like. I couldn't, and tried not to, imagine staying like this all the way to Kaifeng.
A little boy was pinned against the wall, crying shrilly. His father was talking to him frantically, but couldn't get to him. The heat became intense. The guard, a pretty, petite young woman with full ruby lips, was fighting at the doorway with people still trying to get on, although there wasn't an inch of space for them. The crowd brandished their tickets angrily and tried to pull her out of the carriage. She was screaming, screaming at them to get off, get back, crying her eyes out. as they grabbed at her arms. I began to fear she'd lose her fight and bedlam would ensue in this asphyxiating space. Luckily, the train then pulled away. However, that left us with a different problem: five hours of this.
Someone nudged me and I looked round, expecting another confrontation. A man said, in perfect English:
'Hello. Can I help you?'
I must have done a double take, as he repeated the question.
'Can I help you?'
Help. Yes. Sounded good. But I couldn't see for the life of me how. By that time a couple of people on either side of our sardine can had popped through the sides to the carriages left and right, not so much by design but because of the sheer pressure pushing them against and through the doors. We had a miniscule amount of elbowroom. Summoning the last of the air left in my constricted lungs, I explained to him that if he could help us upgrade our tickets to, well, anything better than this, we would be eternally grateful. He shouted something to the little guard in Chinese. She produced a calculator, and told us the price of available hard sleepers. We'd been told at the station there were no hard sleepers left, but seemingly there was. I shoved some money at the girl, and she pocketed it, gesturing at us to follow her. Suddenly, she got her second wind, a surge of confidence. She carved out a way for us to get out of that confined space, and dragged us into the long line of carriages. I asked the guy to come with us, we'd pay, as a thank you, but he shook his head, smiling in wry, fatalistic fashion, comfort isn't for the likes of me y'know, and told us he'd be all right where he was.
It was a long, long walk through all those carriages with our heavy backpacks. People everywhere: whole families on one seat, old men hunkering down under tables, people lying on the luggage racks, more people strewn across the floor like spilled trash, with what looked like all their belongings, in massive red and white striped plastic bags, clogging up the aisles. The girl finally showed us to our bunks, in a carriage only half-full! I felt terrible for the poor people, especially our helpful friend, still stuck in that horrible sardine-can, when we now had this spacious carriage. I pushed the feelings of guilt down, deep down; I was becoming a survivor, a train warrior, a backpacking example of will to power. The girl smiled at our beleaguered but relieved expressions, and I quelled an urge to propose marriage.
We needed a drink. We left our rucksacks in the quiet carriage to look for the buffet car. We found it, near deserted, the only people in it policemen, guards and a crew of cooks dressed in dirty whites, playing cards. We sat down and ordered three cold beers. They looked at us contemptuously, said something in Chinese that we presumed to mean we shouldn't be there. We played our trump - the ignorant foreigner card - shrugged, looked confused, then one of the cooks got up, laughing, to bring us three bottles of cold beer. From being amongst the unluckiest passengers on the train, we were now by far the luckiest. We'd won the last hand, even if it had been rigged for us, as foreigners, in our favour. An image of the squashed little boy invaded my relief. Again, I squashed it down, squashed him down, as if it were me squashing him against the hot carriage wall, and still I sighed with relief. We had a bunk, a cold beer, and a buffet car. We'd survived.
Then all hell broke loose.
The train only stopped at the platform for six minutes. Although the three of us were near the front of our queue, it became a battle of life or death to get on the train. The guards with the loud-halers had disappeared, leaving everyone to fight it out. The line-ups disintegrated into a jostling mob, pushing and shoving around the doors of the carriages. As I pulled myself up the ladder I had to stick my elbows into two people who were scrambling up the side-rails to get on before me. Another guy was hanging on to my big backpack, wrenching at it, trying to pull me off the ladder, my shoulder blades burning with the weight. I turned and punched him. There seemed nothing else I could do.
I managed to get on the train but didn't make it to a carriage. Around twenty people, including Tam, Danuka and I, were crushed into the small space between the two carriages, unable to move, sweating and groaning and wriggling painfully. In Harbin I had seen pigs on the caged back of a truck, squashed in so tight the poor animals around the edges had been crushed to death. That's what it felt like. I couldn't, and tried not to, imagine staying like this all the way to Kaifeng.
A little boy was pinned against the wall, crying shrilly. His father was talking to him frantically, but couldn't get to him. The heat became intense. The guard, a pretty, petite young woman with full ruby lips, was fighting at the doorway with people still trying to get on, although there wasn't an inch of space for them. The crowd brandished their tickets angrily and tried to pull her out of the carriage. She was screaming, screaming at them to get off, get back, crying her eyes out. as they grabbed at her arms. I began to fear she'd lose her fight and bedlam would ensue in this asphyxiating space. Luckily, the train then pulled away. However, that left us with a different problem: five hours of this.
Someone nudged me and I looked round, expecting another confrontation. A man said, in perfect English:
'Hello. Can I help you?'
I must have done a double take, as he repeated the question.
'Can I help you?'
Help. Yes. Sounded good. But I couldn't see for the life of me how. By that time a couple of people on either side of our sardine can had popped through the sides to the carriages left and right, not so much by design but because of the sheer pressure pushing them against and through the doors. We had a miniscule amount of elbowroom. Summoning the last of the air left in my constricted lungs, I explained to him that if he could help us upgrade our tickets to, well, anything better than this, we would be eternally grateful. He shouted something to the little guard in Chinese. She produced a calculator, and told us the price of available hard sleepers. We'd been told at the station there were no hard sleepers left, but seemingly there was. I shoved some money at the girl, and she pocketed it, gesturing at us to follow her. Suddenly, she got her second wind, a surge of confidence. She carved out a way for us to get out of that confined space, and dragged us into the long line of carriages. I asked the guy to come with us, we'd pay, as a thank you, but he shook his head, smiling in wry, fatalistic fashion, comfort isn't for the likes of me y'know, and told us he'd be all right where he was.
It was a long, long walk through all those carriages with our heavy backpacks. People everywhere: whole families on one seat, old men hunkering down under tables, people lying on the luggage racks, more people strewn across the floor like spilled trash, with what looked like all their belongings, in massive red and white striped plastic bags, clogging up the aisles. The girl finally showed us to our bunks, in a carriage only half-full! I felt terrible for the poor people, especially our helpful friend, still stuck in that horrible sardine-can, when we now had this spacious carriage. I pushed the feelings of guilt down, deep down; I was becoming a survivor, a train warrior, a backpacking example of will to power. The girl smiled at our beleaguered but relieved expressions, and I quelled an urge to propose marriage.
We needed a drink. We left our rucksacks in the quiet carriage to look for the buffet car. We found it, near deserted, the only people in it policemen, guards and a crew of cooks dressed in dirty whites, playing cards. We sat down and ordered three cold beers. They looked at us contemptuously, said something in Chinese that we presumed to mean we shouldn't be there. We played our trump - the ignorant foreigner card - shrugged, looked confused, then one of the cooks got up, laughing, to bring us three bottles of cold beer. From being amongst the unluckiest passengers on the train, we were now by far the luckiest. We'd won the last hand, even if it had been rigged for us, as foreigners, in our favour. An image of the squashed little boy invaded my relief. Again, I squashed it down, squashed him down, as if it were me squashing him against the hot carriage wall, and still I sighed with relief. We had a bunk, a cold beer, and a buffet car. We'd survived.
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