All That's Buried

Our last stop in China was the desert--an oasis town called Dunhuang, towards the northwestern edge of the Gansu province, which (just east of Xinjiang which is where the Uighur re-education camps you might have heard about on the news are). We chose Dunhaung because we both had desert dreams and the Silk Road stop popped up in Lonely Planet algorithms, and Lee found a cheap flight to get us there. Flying in early from Xi'an, we came over dramatic snow-capped mountains and landed in a tiny airport under a brown sky--not smog as we had grown accustomed to, but sand. We tried to walk around but shops were shuttered, nothing was where we thought it would be. That afternoon we found refuge in the Mogao Caves, a most magnificent site of Buddhist carvings, housed in thousands of caves carved out by Buddhist hopefuls looking for some kind of peace in the desert hustles of Silk Road days and only one century ago rediscovered. Heavily protected, we were guided around the site in our small tourist group, by a guide in a large hat, a mask across her face, long sleeves, a long skirt who wielded up her tiny flashlight beam to show us the magnificent colors, characters, and scenes as she unlocked each of the eight caves we huddled into. (Tour in Chinese and so we followed along and made the stories up based on what we knew from the amazing film we'd seen in HD at the visitor's center.) Pictures weren't allowed in there, so you'll just have to imagine (or look it up). We saw so many Buddhas and their accompanying characters on our trip but there was truly nothing like these: their facial features, from agony to exhilaration, their vibrant colors, their hiddenness...on an adventure of amazing historical/tourist sites, this might have been the most. And afterwards, I traipsed my way ever so slowly up to the peak of the Singing Sand dunes amazed at all that is buried in this life...a glided back down them sososo fast, with a shot of adrenaline to my heart...

There are some things I had wanted to show you but haven't. I couldn't quite show you the presence of state authority, the security cameras everywhere, the only guns we saw automatics on men in teams loading up cash machines, the metal detectors at every subway station, the eye-scans and fingerprint machines, the gun-less police officers with their people prods laying against the wall, on display, the statue-still officers at Tiananmen Square, the signs everywhere telling you what not to do, the constant reminders about prohibitions posted in hotels, in bathrooms, in stations, the translations so funny, so beyond the intention. And I forgot to show you the fruit--strawberries, yangmei, loquats, plums, peaches, apricots (which were all the rage in Dunhuang), with flavors and colors so sweet and perfect, stronger even than Lebanon, and I thought that place was the heaven of fruit...

Our last stop in China was Shanghai. The apartment was right where we left it, and feeling as familiar and strange as ever. In my last day there, while packing, saying goodbyes at school, erasing the data off my computer and phone, watching the bank man cut apart my cash card, seeing the demon baby statue at the little mall near home for the last time, having my last beer in the alley, I know that I didn't want to leave -- it was a feeling deep in my gut, a resistance until the moment that the stoic customs officer exit-stamped my visa (which was a day from expiration). And yet, also, it was time to go, that's true too. Left some big chunks of me in China; and now, on we go...

Up, up, up

Mount Hua (Huashan) is the westernmost of the Five Sacred Buddhist Mountains of China, and is known to have shrines situated on and near it as early as the second century BC. I’ve read that Daoists believe one can access the underworld at Huashan and pilgrims have come to the mountain for that purpose for centuries, seeking their lost ancestors in the sublime temple garden at the base of the North peak, which is 5,300 feet up, up, up. Of the four other peaks, the South peak is the tallest, at 6,900 feet. / The are is also known for varieties of healing herbs, roots, and seeds—so people come also for immortality. / The range that Huashan is part of splits the state of Shaanxi, and the country of China, and has a history of natural and human drama punctuated by an earthquake in 1556 said to have caused 830,000 deaths, making it one of the biggest human catastrophes. / Trails up (and down) Huashan were carved (and lost) by Daoist, Buddhist, and other pilgrims through the centuries, and shrines established at summits along the way. In the 1949, a group of seven People’s Liberation Army soldiers used a recovered old footpath to overtake a group of 100 enemy soldiers. / The inaccessibility of the peaks was part of the special holiness of the place. Only the very rich or the very hardy would ever make it into the cluster of breath-taking ridges with dramatic drop-offs and gorges. / Until quite recently. In the 1980’s, the land area was turned over the Daoist Association of China for protection. In the 1990’s several trails were reinforced with cement walkways. In 2000, a cable car was built following the trails up to the North peak. A second cable car, down the West peak, was built in 2013. That was the around the time when bullet trains lines were being developed across the country and the time to travel from the major city of Xi’an to Huashan dropped to 30 minutes. Tourism boomed. / Lee and I took the cable car up to the North Peak and down the West peak yesterday—both incredibly terrifying gorgeous rides that had us floating through granite cliffs and looking down at seas of green and the old, forgotten, broken pathways below us. And up there, we walked from peak to peak—about a million stairs with about a million other people—mostly Chinese, it seemed, only less than a handful of other Westerners we saw. Most hikers wore ordinary sneakers like us—many older women in nice dresses and older men in dress pants and nice shirts. Younger people in more casual clothes—we saw so many of the creatively translated English logos we can’t help but enjoy. A few shouts of “hello!” at seeing our faces. Many young children running alongside their parents. A few toddlers taking the stairs slowly, their parents patiently holding onto their arms. Many set-ups of entrepreneurs aiming to take, print, and sell dramatic photos of climbers at particular rocks, ridges, peaks, even against green screens. It was a dry, warm Friday. Tiny temples on each peak had beautifully colorful and shaded shrines set up with offerings—incense, pyramids of pale pink apples, packets of crackers—inside, a dutiful monk looking in on each one. Sometimes we came upon penitents in a deep, deep bow, chanting. Oh, to come to such a place and pray! Often, holy chanting music blasted from a large speaker from the temple across the sky. The crowd slowed down at narrow parts in the path, at places where the summits were small. There were a few notoriously dangerous places—the sky walk where we had to grab on chains and pull ourselves up the face of a boulder holding onto chains, our toes clawing tiny footholds, the plank walk, where we could elect to hug the edge of the ridge while balancing on a narrow plank of wood. There were so many moments when I wished that I might be alone in this place, when I wished the concrete below my feet was more like the packed earth trails of home. Not in this life. And ok. / Being a tourist in China is generally an economically sound endeavor, but yesterday did not feel quite so. Purchasing tickets to take the bus from the tourist center to the cable car, then for each cable car, then for access to the mountain itself came out to about $100 for the both of us. / The village of Huashan is a somewhat dismal widening in the road built around the mountain tourism, and the town further down that road where the train station seems to have little to call attention to it. But if you ever end up this way and need recommendations for a place to stay and places to eat, let me know—Lee and I found the best mutton and duck restaurants in the area, we figured out how to bargain with cab drivers, and scored an incredibly comfortable and cheap and sweet place to stay…and we even ended up buying one of those photos…

We Just Don't Know

“…there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know...” 

In March, my colleague put this quotation up on the large screen in Shanghai, and inwardly, I cringed. Donald Rumsfeld—why? We were holding an orientation meeting of students joining us on a three-day writing retreat in a month’s time, and this was her idea of an icebreaker. (Like her, I will skip rehashing the Rumsfeld/GWB/WMD context, though I will say the ellipses above are important in that light. Also important is that Rumsfeld here is pilfering from numerous psychologists and philosophers, and that Zizek (another man who’s not a fav but says more useful things) adds a fourth category, “the unknown known,” which is perhaps realest to Rumsfeld and his ilk.) My colleague (who I have loved getting to know and is brilliant and amazing and I’ll miss her dearly!) asked the students to write for ten minutes about the upcoming trip—for which they would have to complete required readings and take a no-alcohol pledge—in light of the quotation. Then each of them was to read aloud just a part of what they wrote with the group, and the collage the group shared was utterly moving, a gathering of fragments of hope and limitation about their bodies, the world, their position as foreigners in China, as Chinese in China who don’t know their own country.

And now June has just begun. Beyond our time with those students and colleagues in Jiuhuashan, Lee and I have also now visited Shenzhen, Guanghzo, Guillin, Kunming, Chengdu, and Leshan; tomorrow we are off to the next stop.

There is an element of attraction to unknown I’ve been exploring here, and then of self-consciousness about the attraction. Am I co-opting another culture? Am I having the right experience? Can I speak the language? Do I know enough about the people? The history? The politics in order to most responsibly experience all this? Do I know what I know? Am I working to be conscious of what I don’t know? And why does it matter any way?

I have had some fascinating conversations about the facts above—likely being lied to, inordinantely and otherwise, sometimes being told the truth. I have walked down so many blocks and avenues, learned and forgotten new words, listened to so many speaches—some in languages I know but mostly in language I don’t. I have used my translator and looked up things on Wikipedia, reaching for my phone, again and again—thankful for this this tool of knowing. I have given up and pressed on. I have forced myself to put my phone away. I have sat, for hours, with tea, with beer, with Lee. I have been told I am beautiful, I am tall, I have been told so many things I couldn’t decipher, woman staring at me, poking, yelling, smiling, men taking my picture, parents nudging their children forward with an English phrase, bold children. I have read signs I will never understand, made out a few new letters I do. I have avoided new things sometimes, sought out familiar things, shut myself away. I have gone out. I have swayed to the music made by people I will never meet again, tasted and smelled flavors delightfully beyond my previous catalogue of sensations. I have pointed to random words on menus, to pictures, to dishes being demolished by others. Looked at brushstrokes I will never see again, touched fabrics that won’t be mine, precious stones. No way to record or know them all. Grateful for knowing things I don’t know. Stunned dumb by the peppers, the flowers, the fruit, the light, the thousands of kindnesses I didn’t know to expect…

Forbidden and Great

Not every time, but most times, phone conversations with my father are an epic ride. We share teaching woes (we both started teaching college at the same time, he just after retirement from the foreign service, and me, during my MFA), and always get to American politics (which never fails to get him riled), about novels I’ve suggested he read (based not on the fact that I’ve read them but because I think they sound complex and strange enough for his taste), stocks (with the vague idea I might start paying attention), family gossip (rarely but significantly), travel plans (often it has been the two of us together but now me on a China trip with Lee and he and my mother on a vacation in Italy), and, basically, the philosophical/historical/social underpinnings of LIFE. Over the years, our conversation has developed a rhythm of banter and disagreement, a sort of play despite our deep father-daughter dynamic, and yet, when we get to this metaphysical place, that’s when we begin to differ in a substantial way where it feels like we have moved beyond ourselves and are having a conversation that might matter to others. A recent example of this, on China:

Me: “[After talking about paying for stuff on my phone and visiting the newly developed part of Suzhou and how the trains in Shanghai run on time] It’s just so future-y and intense. Like they are on this wave of the future, where they get something about where we are going to be in a few years…” Dad: “It’s always been that way.” Me: “No, Dad, that’s not what I mean. I mean, this is new, this is what I’m witnessing happening, right now.” Dad: “Uhmmm…okayyy. Why are you so obsessed with the future?” Me: “Why are you so obsessed with the past?” Ahhhh, maybe you don’t get it, but my blood starts boiling even rewriting some approximation of this conversation. It is one of our fundamental disagreements. And we let it go.

Me: “Ok, let’s agree to disagree.” Dad: “Ok?”

Eventually, the conversation has to end because there are dinners to read and emails to write and sleeps to be had, but there is the promise that it will continue… // In the heart of Beijing, the Forbidden City is a 720,000 m.sq. rectangular complex of 980 buildings and numerous courtyards and alleyways and gardens, constructed in 1420 by the Ming Dynasty that housed Chinese emperors until the early 1900’s, sometimes including their 9,000 concubines, according to some historians. Currently, it houses the Palace Museum, a collection of art works from across China, and is open to the public daily, seeing 16.7 million visitors per year.

The Great Wall stretches across China for 13,171 miles and roughly traces the edge of the Mongolian Steppe. Construction of some of its multiple courses began as early as the 7th century BC and continued all the way through the 1600’s, when the most wellknown stretches were built by the Ming Dynasty. Historians estimate that some 400,000 died in building it. Portions of it are continually preserved and visited daily by tourists (and in some parts bricks have been stolen and sold, used to build houses, and, contrary to what you may have heard, it is not, in fact, visible from space). I visited both recently, and I was prepared to be underwhelmed. I went with the attitude that I was in China so I had to; just some tourist stuff I was checking off a bucket list. But: I have to say, the Great Wall and Forbidden City are not sites you “do” in a half-day visit, they are jaw-dropping happenings that steal your breath from a distance and in their tiniest-up-close parts, places that we are fortunate still exist in this fickle world, sites of human innovation and history and longing, a density of collective past and present materials and emotions which I could barely float on the edges of I felt so full of all of it…long story short: my dad was right.