Having Fun All The Time

As my spoken Chinese level continues to improve, I’m finding myself engaging in extended conversation with strangers more and more often. Speaking with strangers is something I’ve been doing since my first days in China more than two years ago, of course, but in the past it’s always been a rather stilted, awkward affair. Especially in my first year, it was all I could do to blurt out answers to basic questions, focusing carefully on my tones and grammar and word choice, just praying that I wouldn’t say something horribly unintelligible, awkward, or worse–offensive or embarrassing.

For example, when having dinner with my students in my second semester, I intended to say, “I want to ask you a question” (wǒ xiǎng wèn nǐ yī xià/我想问你一下) but because of a tonal mistake ended up saying, “I want to kiss you” (wǒ xiǎng wěn nǐ yī xià/我想吻你一下）. The operative verb there being wèn/wěn–the classic beginner’s mistake.

In my second year, conversations with strangers picked up a lot, and I started making friends. One of my best friends in China I met on the bus on the way home from work. She sat down next to me and we ended up chatting happily for fifteen minutes, and I was on my toes enough to ask for her number before she got off the bus. That random encounter blossomed into a great friendship, which ended up turning into a lot of friendships with her friends and her boyfriend’s friends. But it was something of a rarity. Usually when strangers spoke to me, or I spoke to them, I tried my best to answer their questions in a friendly way and to show my own curiosity, but oftentimes encounters ended with a fizzle as I lacked the confidence to really engage them enthusiastically, and generally strangers seemed oddly dissatisfied with my answers, although they always complimented me on my Chinese.

Recently I believe I may have discovered one of the reasons: The nǐ versus nín form of address. The first one (你）is the informal word for “you” in Chinese. The second (您）is the polite form–the eqivalent of tu and vous in French, or tú and usted in Spanish. The informal is used for friends or people your own age in Chinese, or for people you’ve met at least once before. The formal, of course, is for older people or people in some position of authority, or for people you’ve just met.

Of course, being a native English speaker, my brain doesn’t work that way. Especially coming from the northeast United States, where the norm is to be chummy and relatively informal with strangers, previously it always felt unnatural and forced, even with my superiors at work, to use the polite form. It always felt like I was sucking up or being a brown-noser. Also, I had gotten used to saying nǐ and it was a struggle for me to twist out the slightly different pronunciation every time I asked a question or used the word for “you,” which was a lot.

Of course, as with anything new, especially in language study, the new thing is hard to do the first few times but then it quickly gets a lot easier. I found as I started introducing nín into my speaking that people seemed to react much more positively to me, and to show more patience and acceptance right away. These things are of course really hard to gauge–you never know why someone reacts the way they do–but since I started using nín I feel that I’ve had much more success in having longer and richer conversations with people I’m meeting for the first time–my own age, older, men, women, everybody.

And it makes sense. If you’re addressing someone in the familiar form and you’re not familiar, they’re gonna think it’s weird. And now that I’ve adapted in this way I notice the rather sudden, unexpressed change in relationship that occurs when the other person starts using nǐ (which usually happens about five to ten minutes into a conversation). This is incredibly important, because when you’re studying a language, pretty much all you want to do is engage other people in that language and it always feels amazing to have involved conversations in that language. Just like having a fantastic conversation in English feels great, but possibly better. Just today I was eating lunch in the dining hall alone, as usual, but I changed one thing: I kept my phone in my pocket and stopped myself from reading the news while I ate. I just sat there and waited for someone to sit down across from me. And when somebody sat down, I waited two minutes, and then started what turned out to be a great conversation: “Nín shì zhèbiān de lǎoshī ma?” Are you a teacher here?

I’ve tried that question many times before, but in the past I usually made the mistake of using nǐ. Now I see that all along I was (maybe) getting things off on the wrong foot, subtly annoying or offending the person across from me rather than flattering them. And of course the rule of conversation with new people is: flatter.

Even with Chinese, who always claim to be modest and not to care about politeness, it turns out it still matters.

We got up early the next day and got on a bus to Tiger Leaping Gorge. We spent three hours on the bus riding through the Yunnan countryside, and along the way got acquainted with the other foreigners who were with us. They turned out to be a great bunch: a young English couple who were in the middle of a six-month trip through Asia, and a couple who had come from Spain to travel—one American guy who had been living in Spain for four years and was fluent in Spanish, and his wife, a very warm Spanish lady whose face lit up with an amazing smile whenever anybody spoke with her.

Along the way I asked the English couple a question that had been nagging on my mind ever since the first time I met someone who was doing a World Tour or equivalent, like they were doing—a trip that lasted months on end with no stops at home to rest and recuperate and let your feet settle back on the ground: How do you keep from getting completely exhausted?

Despite the fact that Jane's Hostel was a rathole, they had some really cute puppies.

This question has particular significance for me because traveling, while one of the most stimulating things I’ve found on this earth to do, completely takes it out of me. It’s not only physically tiring, but deeply emotionally draining. This, for me, is just because of the constant movement and change: picking yourself up every few days, or week, or few weeks, and getting on a bus or train or plane to a new part of the world—I love it, but after a couple of weeks I tend to get weirdly moody and excitable, and to have a tendency to break down. I find that this is usually a delayed reaction: when I have to deal with something stressful while traveling, I usually have little emotional reaction while the thing is going on, but a day or two later when I have a minute to myself, I feel totally adrift. This happens especially when I meet someone and travel with them for a day or two or longer, and then split off and go back on my own. The transition can be abrupt and very unsettling.

And when I asked my question I could tell that I wasn’t alone in this feeling, because the English folks knew exactly what I was talking about and the girlfriend, Anne, answered without blinking: “We take days off,” she said. “Every so often along the way, when we find some particularly nice hotel or beach or something, we’ll just stay in that place for a few days and not do anything, not go anywhere except maybe to eat. We’ll just read our books or write in our journals or whatever….sometimes you feel guilty that you’re not out there seeing stuff, like if you miss some waterfall or something, but then you just tell yourself, ‘Well, I saw 20 waterfalls yesterday, so it’s not a big deal…’”

Day one at Tiger Leaping Gorge definitely gets my vote for the best day of the trip.

This idea might have been perfectly obvious to anyone else, but I had never really thought about taking “days off” while actually vacationing around China. But I liked the idea, and after Tiger Leaping Gorge when we got back to Lijiang for the second time, we put it to good use.

But we were still approaching Tiger Leaping Gorge—this would not be a “day off”, although it would be the nicest day of our whole month-long adventure. When we arrived at Jane’s Hostel at the trailhead I realized that I hadn’t actually checked the guidebook at all, so I asked the others where to go from here, because they looked like they knew what they were doing. They explained that we could leave our bags at the hostel, start the trek, and then when we arrived at the other end a bus would bring us back by road to this very hostel to pick up our stuff.

It's the perfect place for a hike: two days, lodging on the way, few people, and beautiful.

Since Jess and I had left our bags back in Lijiang and were carrying small daypacks, we didn’t have to deal with this, but we grabbed a bite to eat at Jane’s (gross food, lots of flies, also other reviews online say the rooms are nasty) and then started the hike.

We walked for about 45 minutes up a hill that afforded pretty views down into the valley below us, corn and other vegetables planted in various spots along the mountainside, and at the bottom a lazy brown river which we would be following for the next two days.

After an hour we rested at a little store along the trail, and started talking to a Swiss guy who had been traveling solo for six months all over the world. I asked him how long he was going to carry on, and he shrugged.

“I dunno; it depends on when I run out of money,” he said, as if the detail couldn’t matter less to him.

Tiger Leaping Gorge.

He explained that when his money was gone he was going to go to Australia to work for a while—I learned on this trip that Australia has a program that Americans can also participate in which allows you to work there for a year at any job you can find, kind of a work-travel thing—and then he would head home. After a few minutes, we all got up and started the hike again, and the Swiss guy charged ahead. That was when we saw the mountains along the gorge for the first time.

The straight stone faces of the mountains were dramatic in all this peaceful greenery, and as soon as I set eyes on them I felt all the stress of the last year in China melt away. This was going to be a good hike. After a couple more hours Jess and I set nicely into the rhythm of walking, and eventually we neared the “28 bends”, a steepish switchbacked part of the trail.

It was here that I saw, for the first time, real marijuana in China.

Before the steep 28 bends started there was a little stand on the trailside, with a few young Chinese guys milling about and an old lady standing behind the counter. I was hot and sweaty so didn’t take the time to look around; I homed in on the cooler.

Perhaps you can tell from the look on my face how completely relaxed the place made me feel. Maybe Chinese describes it better than English: xìngfú -- blessed, lucky happiness.

“How much is the water?” I asked.

“Eight for a big one, five for a small one,” the old lady answered in Chinese.

“Are you gonna have water?” I asked Jess, and she replied in the affirmative.

“I’ll have a big one,” I told the old lady in Chinese. “Are they cold?” I asked.

“Yes, yes, they’re cold,” she said, and reached down into the cooler.

She pulled up the water and handed it to me.

“Eight yuan, right?”

“Yes, eight yuan,” she said.

Then, as I was pulling a five and three ones from my wallet, the old lady said a word that I had never heard before.

Tiger Leaping Gorge.

There was a silence after she said it. It had sounded a little like meiyou ah na. My brain, which had become accustomed to working extra hard to decipher meaning from southwestern Chinese peoples’ strange tones and accents, began scanning it for some meaning in Chinese. The first part definitely seemed like the word méiyǒu, which meant “don’t have” or “no”; but the second half made no sense. A na? It could be a word. Those two syllables appear in Chinese, but they didn’t make sense together.

I decided to ignore it, since whatever she said couldn’t have been that important (I had already got the water, which was what I wanted), when my cousin, standing just behind me, said this:

“Ganja, something for you to smoke to get relaxed in the hills.”

“What?” I asked, and turned.

Our room in the Tea Horse Hostel.

“They’re selling marijuana here,” she said. “Look at this little sign.”

“It’s fake,” I said. This was my knee-jerk reaction to this news: I had encountered “pot” in China before, but it was all just dried herbs. I never expected to see real marijuana in China.

Then another voice piped up.

“No, it’s not fake,” a man’s voice, German accented, said. “It’s total shit, but it’s real.”

I looked around and saw the Swiss guy who we’d been sharing the trail with all day.

Sunrise behind the mountains on the second day. We left before it breached them.

“How do you know?” I asked

“Because I smoke it,” he said.

“You mean you’ve smoked this weed or you smoke back in your home?”

“Back in my home, but I know.”

This seemed impossible to me: here of all places, why would they have pot? It made sense in the huge cities like Guangzhou, Shanghai and Shenzhen, but up in these mountains?

An old man herding goats in the hills on the second day. For rillz.

But it was real. I picked up a bag and sniffed it, and it was definitely pot. It was extremely heavy with seeds and dried and shredded poorly, and there was little visible evidence of the putrid and sticky crystals that represent heavy THC content in pot in the U.S. But it was pot. I was awestruck, knowing that China has very strict penalties for dealing drugs, to find it so obviously for sale even in the mountains. Only two years ago an Englishman was put to death in China for carrying 4 kilograms of heroin into an airport in northwest China. Chinese people are executed with fair regularity for drug dealing. But here it was, in Yunnan, out in the open.

The Swiss guy said that in some of the small towns around Lijiang—Dali and Shaxi—it was everywhere, usually offered by little old ladies like this one, who had been taught two English words: “ganja” and “marijuana”. This seemed to lead him to believe that pot is common in China, but that’s a false notion.

Virtually every Chinese I had ever met had only a very vague notion of what pot was, and had certainly never seen it except in Western movies.

The English says "Safe Path" on the left, but what does that imply about the "Ladder" on the right? (Chinese says "Makeshift Road" on left and "Sky Ladder" on the right.)

Based on the fact that these ladies knew English slang terms for pot, it was clear that they were part of an operation that produced and sold weed throughout this area, and they were just at the retail end of things. Somebody higher up had clearly studied English, maybe been abroad. And the fact that they had a market made sense: I couldn’t imagine Chinese tourists buying this stuff, but there were a lot of foreigners touring through this area, and foreigners are easy to spot anywhere in China.

Leaving the weed behind but taking the water, Jess and I continued up the trail and a few hours later, after a relatively tough hike through the “28 bends”, we arrived at the Tea Horse Hostel, a courtyard-style building set just off the trail perched at the top of the gorge, a thin dirt road leading up to it from the river far below us, which was presumably how they got food and other goods up to the hostel.

At the bottom of the gorge near the end of the trail.

The Tea Horse was very simple—you could even say rustic—but that was fine for us after spending five or six hours on the trail. Behind the hostel was a cement patio with an uninhibited view of the mountains, and there we found our American-Spanish friends enjoying beers in the late-afternoon sunshine. There was another hostel an hour or so down the trail, but the sight of cold beer incapacitated me. It was decided. We would stay here for the night.

The beds were cheap—25 yuan, just north of three dollars for a night—and the food was decent. The company was better. The group we had shared the van with coming out here, the English folks, the Spanish-American folks, and us, shared a table and started telling stories and drinking beers. Jess seemed to be having a good time and seemed to take to the wonderful Spanish woman and the American guy who had mastered the language she had struggled with in high school. A couple of guys joined us—a Briton who had been living in Paris for several years, and his darkly handsome Moldovan boyfriend, who was also in Paris. Between us we had more than half a dozen languages: The American guy spoke English and Spanish; his wife of course spoke both as well; the English guy spoke French, his boyfriend spoke English, French, Russian and Moldovan; and I spoke Chinese; and with the Swiss guy, who joined us briefly, we had at least German and maybe another language or two as well.

Point being that it was an interesting group and we had a lot of stories. So we drank and talked until 1 a.m. Somewhere around that time I got a laugh with my best China drinking story: the one about getting so drunk that my decision-making skills were sufficiently impaired that I actually stepped into the doorway of a “red-light parlor” with a Chinese friend of mine, but then got a hold of myself and then put the kibosh on that idea, went back to my friend’s house with him (the buses had stopped running so I couldn’t get back home) and proceeded to throw up on everything. This was shortly after I arrived in China, before I learned how to keep control in the new drinking culture. Always good for a laugh.

Climbing back up.

At some point I got up to grab another beer and walked by a table of people conversing with one of the hostel girls, and this is what I overheard:

One of the foreigners said: “Are you sure it’s legal in China?”

And the hostel girl said: “Yes.”

“I mean, legal, you know what legal means?”

“I think so…” she said.

And, knowing what they were talking about, and since I had had two beers and was now willing to interrupt anyone’s conversation, I interjected as I walked past: “No, it’s definitely not legal,” and then, for good measure, I added: “Kěndìng shì bùhéfǎ de.”

“That’s what I thought,” the foreigner said. “How do you say marijuana in Chinese?”

“Dàmá,” I said.

And from the hostel girl: “Ohhh…” A sound of sudden recognition.

I went and got my beer.

Needless to say, we left the "safe path" for the chickens...on the way back up, anyway.

Back at the patio, the English and Moldovan guy told a story from that day: Somewhere along the trail at Tiger Leaping Gorge they had come across a “sightseeing” spot, a little spur trail, with a sign in front saying you had to pay something like 8 yuan to go down it, and an old Chinese lady collecting money. Since we were in the middle of the woods and it seemed like you shouldn’t have to pay some random old lady to go down a public trail, and on top of that since we had paid about 50 yuan to get into this scenic area in the first place, the English and Moldovan guy had ignored her and just walked on past. So she had done the following: hissed, spit in their faces, threw rocks in their direction (without hitting them) and brandished a knife at them (without stabbing). They were clearly traumatized by the encounter, and I was mystified. Apparently anything is possible in Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Some time, late at night, we all went to bed. And we all seemed to sleep well. And early in the morning Jess and I got up and started our walk. The sky was clearer than it almost ever is in China and the air was cool, perfect for a walk. We spent the day on the trail and hardly saw anyone. The English couple were a half hour ahead of us but we only saw them occasionally in the distance. It was the rarest thing in China: peace, serenity, silence. And for that reason it was perfect. Jess seemed to love it too, but perhaps it was especially wonderful for me, having such little chance in China to experience such blissful quiet and emptiness. China is large, and living and working in the east, you rarely find yourself so literally alone (although it’s not hard to feel alone). I loved it.

Finishing the climb up the 30- to 40-foot ladder.

Around mid-afternoon we arrived at the “end” of the hike (although we could and should have continued on to Walnut Grove on a cliff-trail by the riverside, had we only known…) at a place called Tina’s Guesthouse. There we bought our bus tickets back to Lijiang and rested, pretty exhausted after the day’s hike. It had begun to rain near the end of our hike and on the road back to Lijiang Jess and I sat mostly in silence, listening to part of an episode of This American Life on my iPod. After arriving back in Lijiang, we were both tired from the hike.

So we took a day off. That evening we just lounged around, and the next day we just lounged around, too. Our trains were leaving at 9:30 that night, and we spent the whole day inside the hostel. Jess spent her time on the computer and I spent mine reading and chatting with other people in the hostel. And it was nice. And we were leaving at 9:30 p.m.. And we ate a wonderful family-style dinner that evening at the hostel with the employees. And we had a nice chat with them. And they explained that Dali and Shaxi are better than Lijiang; even one of the girls from Lijiang said so. And then I hung out some underwear to dry in the laundry room. And I chatted with a French girl named Emilie for a while in the hostel; she had been studying medicine in Yunnan. And she was nice. And she was very smart and interesting. And she seemed really nice. And she was quite good looking. And I asked if she wanted to watch a movie and she said yes. And she picked a movie and I turned on the TV and she started curling up on a blanket in front of the TV that could not possibly be big enough for us to sit on together without being very close. And it was obvious that she was expecting me to sit on the blanket. And it was 6:45, and we had almost three hours until our train would leave, and it was so nice, until I checked our tickets again and realized that I had read our tickets wrong that morning and that we were leaving at 7:30, not 9:30.

So we grabbed our stuff, and I said goodbye to Emilie (my face probably completely shattered) and we ran out of the hostel and caught the first overpriced cab we could (no time to haggle) and went straight to the train station and got on our train.

It’s a good thing the trains from Lijiang to Kunming are really nice and comfy. I promptly forgot about the nice French girl in the hostel (as my tiny squirrel brain has a tendency to do) and chatted with two middle-aged guys from northeast China for about an hour, until the train people turned out the lights and everybody went to sleep.

Our arrival back in Lijiang was blessed with a rainbow. How's that for service?

Of course, things took a turn for the worse the next day. The magic of Lijiang and the Tiger Leaping Gorge was shattered when they turned on the interior lights on the train at 5 in the morning for no FUCKING reason, even though we were arriving in Kunming three hours later. And started playing really loud music, again for no reason. And then announced that we would “very soon be arriving in Kunming” an hour before we got there. It was a nightmare. Everybody was tired, still trying to sleep, almost everybody on the train, for those three hours, but the train stewards made it impossible to sleep for no reason.

I will say only briefly: this, and a thousand other reasons, is probably why China was rated second-to-worst-place in terms of service by The New York Times Magazine.

And one other reason: Jess forgot her bag on the train, and it was taken, I am nearly certain, by a train steward. Like, not taken and sent to lost and found, but just taken. I say this because after we got back to the hostel and Jess realized that she had lost her bag, I did the following: I went to the train station and begged them to help me; I spoke to about ten different officials of different rank and order until I found the correct place to ask for help getting the bag. Those guys then took a half hour to find out that the train had already been sent to the Cheku—the parking garage—and that I would have to go there myself to look for the bag. So I got a cab and he didn’t know how to get to the cheku. So I switched cabs and a nice middle aged lady drove me there. And I gave my passport to the guys at the gate. And I walked a half mile to the train. And got on board and walked the whole length of the thing to the very car that we had ridden in and checked it myself. And there was no bag. And I asked the cleaning ladies about it and they seemed certain that I would never see that bag again.

And every step along the way, people asked me what was in the bag. As if they knew that the level of importance of what was in the bag would determine whether or not it was “found”. In retrospect I probably should have lied and said that my passport was in the bag, and it might have turned up, but as it was it just contained Jess’s driver’s license, wallet, credit card, and some clothes. And after all that, the bag never surfaced.

I called Jess and broke the news, and then went back to the hostel. I realized around that time that I had also forgotten something over the last day (not just Emilie): the underwear I had hung up in the hostel in Lijiang was still there, waiting for some brave soul other than me to take it down.

Jess called her mom and told her about the bag, and I waited for the tears. Knowing my family as I do, I had a feeling they would come. And come they did. I’m not sure if every family is like this, but nobody in my family has ever liked it when things got lost. The reaction is always bad. It was bad when I was 1 to 18 years of age, and watching Jess’s face as she dealt with battling her own conscience about losing the bag, and then dealt with her family’s frustration that she had lost her license and credit card, was like looking at a mirror that could show me myself 10 or 15 years ago. It was strange and rather freeing, in a way: I realized that whatever horrible things I feel now whenever I screw something up are not just things I feel but things everybody feels. And they come from the hard process of growing up, and dealing with screw ups and lost bags and little failures like that, and learning the hard way how not to do that anymore. Which is the only way to learn it—the hard way. In a way, it sucks to feel awful and cry and get yelled at by your parents, but I guess…if there’s a good thing in it…it’s probably that you learn.

Anyway, we got over the missing bag and didn’t talk about it anymore, and relaxed for a day in Kunming. And soon it was time to go again to get on a plane to Shanghai, which was our final stop on the adventure. And which would be the place I would finally say goodbye to my cuz, and continue the China adventure on my own—this time, with a couple days’ rest in me, slightly better able to get by.

Next: Shanghai, meeting up with one of my uni students and saying goodbye to Jess.

Our next destination was Yúnnán in Southwestern China, bordering Vietnam and Tibet. Far away from anything I had seen in China yet and south of Sìchuān, Yúnnán was hot and beautiful, and from what I saw as we traveled through the province, the women were definitely better looking than in Sìchuān, too.

Our real destination in Yúnnán was Lìjiāng, a small historic town in northern Yúnnán that is listed as a Unesco World Heritage site. We arrived on the comfy double-decker sleeper train early; the sun had recently come up and the air was a little chilly. Traffic was heavy as we left the train station but soon thinned out as we passed through sparse suburbs until we arrived at the Lìjiāng old town.

The town of Lijiang. Beautiful, but too touristy.

The old town is all cobblestone street and old wooden houses, some partially or completely restored, some authentically old but with restored roofs and interiors, but some genuinely crumbling, looking old and dilapidated and lovely.

Lìjiāng is famed for this sort of thing, and was genuinely nice, but we found out very soon that we should have planned to stay in this place only one night and then have moved on, either to the real countryside or to nearby Dàlǐ or Shāxī, which everyone we met said was worlds better than Lìjiāng. Lìjiāng was just another tourist destination, and I learned again, as I had learned at nearly every stop on this trip, what was impossible to decipher in the guidebooks—you’ve got to head away from the tourist spot at all costs in this country, or be damned.

Jess hanging out in the nice hostel we stayed in, the Panba Hostel.

The driver pulled up to a quiet side street and we walked to our hostel, and I tried for a couple of hours to get in touch with my friend Shūlěi, who was also traveling in Lìjiāng at this time, with no luck. Who knows where she was or why she wasn’t contacting us. She had messaged me the night before saying that I should get in touch when we arrived, and we had spoken and agreed that we would meet today.

After a while Jess started talking about wanting to rent a motorcycle. I didn’t know where to get one but the hostel manager, a guy named Jiāng Yángzi (English name River), told me that we might be able to go to a village called Shùhé to rent bikes, so we hopped on the broken down hostel bikes and took off, rode for about an hour, about 7 or 8 miles, me asking directions every ten minutes, until we arrived in the village.

It was overwhelmed with horses and stalls selling souvenirs, a nightmare and worse than Lìjiāng itself, which the foreigners we had met along the way all derided as just another tourist trap.

We crawled through the little town for an hour but found no motorcycles, so I called the hostel and they told us to try another place. So we biked for an hour to find it, only to find that my Google maps was wrong. And in the end we simply returned to the hostel after biking in the hot sun for four hours, basically convinced that there were no motorcycles for rent anywhere in Lìjiāng (this turned out to be true; I confirmed later).

We stayed in the hostel waiting for Shūlěi to call, and I tried to work out the details of what we could do over the next couple of days. I texted Shūlěi and eventually she got back to me, calling, and said that she could see us the next morning and that they were staying outside of town.

So we relaxed. We were both exhausted from the bike ride and badly sunburned, and Jess collapsed into bed and stayed there the whole afternoon. I looked in the guide and went off to try to find a restaurant that claimed to offer calligraphy lessons, and walked for two hours aimlessly, unable to find the place in the winding roads of the old town, asking for directions multiple times and still not getting anywhere.

It got dark and I gave up. The streets were getting thicker with people, the noise growing steadily, until I wanted to escape temporarily. I went back to the hostel and found Jess still in the room, dozing. I asked her if she wanted to eat and she said, as usual, no, so I told her I was going to take a shower and we could go after that.

I went downstairs to relax a bit more after my shower and met an American guy who had been traveling with a woman who looked Chinese. She was tall and beautiful, with shoulder length hair that she repeatedly pushed back with her hand, a nervous tick that conveniently looked good.

The woman had heard me speaking Chinese and complimented me on it through the guy, in a way, and then he asked me my method for studying. I told him about how I’ve used Chinesepod for two years and then asked a few questions, and the girl spoke to me in Chinese. She was wearing leggings, dressed like an American, and as always it took me ten minutes to realize that she spoke perfect American English. By this time there was a weird tension between us, the American Chinese girl who speaks perfect English and perfect Chinese, confronted by the American white male studying Chinese who speaks decent Chinese and English, both vaguely threatened by each other in some inexpressible way, both on not opposite but opposing ends of a cultural spectrum, looking at it from different angles, somehow epistemologically indifferent to each other.

Shulei and Pingping arrive in Lijiang.

Finally I showered and Jess and I wandered around the town, which in the evening had become furiously choked with Chinese tourists, shouting, loud, pushing, crowding around street attractions, moving slowly and bumping into each other, everybody either trying to pass someone or walking too slowly. We got sidetracked and went over a bridge I didn’t recognize. We saw children placing paper flowers with candles on them in the small river and the candles getting caught in a whirlpool and piling up beside the bridge, only a meter away from the kids, refusing to budge and shattering the magic of what they were doing. We walked past an old well in the town that had once been used for drinking water, now surrounded by a crush of Chinese snapping their cameras and shouting, and we caught a glimpse of a man standing down in the well, holding a bowl of clear looking water over his head, preparing to drink.

We got back on track and arrived at the restaurant, which was nearly empty, and the waiters curtly directed us to our seats, where we looked at 50 yuan burgers, 30 yuan Tibetan dumplings, 20 yuan sodas, everything overpriced but at least with a relaxing environment. The bathroom was in a store next door and a sign inside instructed customers in English, “only pee, no poo!” and in Chinese, “forbidden to large convenience” (this is the Chinese way of saying “poo”).

We ordered our food and jess found that her burger had egg mixed in the meat, as well as carrots and some other unidentifiable vegetables.

The dumplings were OK but I felt that we had wasted our time and money coming here. And on the way out we wanted to pay money for a book from the book swap, which they initially agreed to but then reneged. By now I felt sick from the extremely spicy and delicious noodles I had had for lunch, and we started to rush back to the hostel, but Jess saw a dress she wanted on the way. She bought it quickly while I writhed in stomach pain standing up in an alley outside, trying to avoid the tourists who crowded and streamed around me.

We went back to the hostel and soon went to sleep, feeling stressed and frustrated, both, I think, slightly disappointed with the day, but expecting, rightly, better things to come.

Monday I got up early, unable to sleep, and Shūlěi called me in the morning and said that we could meet in about an hour. I set out to meet her and her friend Píngpíng and found them eventually near the water wheel in the middle of Lìjiāng old town, and we walked back to the hostel together. Shūlěi’s friend was very friendly and a little shy at first, and it took about 15 minutes for me to realize that she could speak English and that she had lived in England for four years. Shūlěi thought that I had been traveling with three others and was surprised to learn that I was only with my cousin; they met Jess back at the hostel, and we sat around drinking tea for a while until it was time to go get food.

The delicious meal we had together.

We walked up to the main street above the old town to find a restaurant, where Jess became horrified by the chickens and fish being slaughtered and cleaned in the doorways of the restaurants. “We’re not eating here, are we?” she asked with a raised eyebrow when we stopped in front of one of the places. They were classic Chinese—loud, grimy, doing brisk business with a mix of different style of dishes.

“They feel this kind of thing is pretty disgusting,” Píngpíng said to Shūlěi in Chinese.

“It’s OK,” I said, “she does think it’s kind of gross, but I don’t mind.”

“Well let’s go somewhere else,” Shūlěi said.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, my stomach grumbling. “She’s not going to eat anything no matter where we go. She picks bones out of a chicken egg,” I added, using a Chinese idiom to describe someone who’s overly picky.

“How can you treat your cousin like that?” Shūlěi demanded, laughing a little at how uncouth I was, and she and Píngpíng led us on to a place where they weren’t slaughtering chickens but only cleaning fish in front.

Shulei with Pigsy, the monstrous dog at the hostel in Lashihai.

We ordered fish flavored fried pork with no spice for jess, and fried Chinese greens, and a boiling vat of spicy fish for the rest of us and ate well, Jess occasionally chatting with Píngpíng and Shūlěi listening intently, trying to parse their English, and interjecting in Chinese when she understood something they said. There were times when Shūlěi couldn’t understand what we were saying, but mostly she could follow along.

I wanted Jess to be able to participate in all our conversations so I tried to translate whenever we spoke Chinese, but also I felt that this was part of the experience of truly experiencing a language — being very aware that you don’t understand, listening to the sounds, occasionally being caught with someone who can’t speak at all. Seeing Jess in that state reminded me of the few times, in the very beginning, when I was left on my own–when I rode in a car with someone who spoke no English and I spoke no Chinese, when a friend who spoke English got up to use the bathroom–those moments when you are left with someone who speaks a different language, who perhaps wants to ask you things, say things to you, but who has no choice but to sit in silence while you sit in silence, neither of you wanting to frighten the other by launching into a speech in an unfamiliar language.

Lashihai was exactly what we needed after a day in Lijiang.

This had been the reason I had studied Chinese to begin with. I had wanted to see what it was like to be the one who was able to pierce that wall of silence, where the combinations of sounds—seemingly arbitrary, endlessly complex, irreproducible without years of effort—became beautiful aural symbols that released us from our cages of silence, sometimes made us aware of how simple and helpless we were without it, how defenseless and isolated a person is without words.

After lunch Shūlěi and Píngpíng left to go meet some people who they might be sharing a van to Tibet with. Their plan was to hire a van and a driver to take them the rest of the way across the west to Tibet in a long drive, four people altogether, crammed into one van, and since two of Shūlěi’s friends were going home they would have to share the van with two strangers.

Lashihai.

Jess and I relaxed at noon, still feeling not fully adjusted to the elevation change and the rough couple of train rides that had brought us to Lìjiāng, and then around 4 we went to meet Shūlěi near the water wheel again.

The four of us took a cab ride out to where the girls had been staying, Lāshìhǎi lake, about 20 minutes away from town.

The cab ride took about 25 minutes. First we zipped through the streets of Lìjiāng and quickly escaped onto a narrow country road, and began climbing up a hill. Soon we were at the lake—a long stretch of still water surrounded by motionless fields of grass and gently sloping mountains. Everything was a bit gray and muted, the clouds steely, suggesting rain, the air cool and lightly windy. The place was beautiful and quiet enough to hear the wind blowing in the leaves; there was only one road visible, the one we came in on, and no other cars in sight.

Lashihai.

Shūlěi and Píngpíng explained that they had found the place after they had arrived in Lìjiāng. They had been staying in the old town and hadn’t liked it, so they had taken a cab ride to check out the area outside town. They had gone to Lāshìhǎi and walked for a while, and paid an entrance fee. Then they walked ahead further and met some men who asked them for money to go for a boat ride, but they were a little startled by the six men, who were large and somewhat forbidding looking. So they declined the boat ride and walked by themselves a long way, walking around the river until they were hungry and thirsty, until they finally found a house that looked somewhat like a hotel, and they knocked on the door, and someone answered.

It turned out it was an incomplete and run-down hostel on the side of the lake, inhabited by a young Chinese guy from eastern China who had moved to this area to relax and work with the locals. Shūlěi and Píngpíng both explained that he helped the locals, but they didn’t clarify exactly how, except that he helped them buy things that they needed and teach them some things. He had a Harley Davidson motorcycle in the hostel, and lots of western liquor, but the grass in the courtyard was severely overgrown and it appeared that they hadn’t cleaned the place in some time. It looked almost abandoned, but was still running. In the entryway there was a comfortable and relaxing couch with a table in the center, a hanging chair, but it appeared that no one had used any of it in weeks.

Píngpíng stayed behind to prepare to leave for Tibet, and Shūlěi took us for a walk out toward the lake through the soggy grass in the wetland, our flip flops gathering thick, heavy muck. Horses grazed on the side of the road and throughout the wetlands. Apple trees and pears grew in the orchards ringing the lake, the apples individually wrapped in small paper bags, to protect them from bugs or the sun, I couldn’t be sure which.

“Why is it like this?” I asked Shūlěi. “It seems the hostel is set up for foreigners, but there’s no one there.”

The hostel in Lashihai, with Prince, the dog.

“Actually he’s not the owner,” she said. “The owner is cycling to Nepal and he’s been gone for two months, and when he comes back they’re hoping to finish it and start up a hang-gliding operation here, but they still haven’t figured it out. And when he comes back this guy might leave.”

“Wow, he’s got a pretty comfortable life,” I said, but Shūlěi didn’t respond to that at all.

Shūlěi had been a good friend of mine for several months in Sanming. She was very different from all the other Chinese women I had met: she was confident, for one—she moved and spoke in a self-assured way that you rarely saw in young Chinese women; she was very friendly and outgoing, and wasn’t shy about saying what she thought, and often expressed more thoughtful opinions than many of the young women I met; she also never asked me silly questions that directly related to my foreignness, and seemed to sense that I would rather just be treated like an ordinary person. She didn’t try to pamper me or treat me like I was special; if we ate something or had tea together, I could pay or she could pay or we could split the bill; she didn’t worry about it. And perhaps most of all she expressed dissatisfaction with the traditional life she was expected to lead—she had a steady job at the university that her parents wanted her to keep, but sometimes she talked about ditching her “stable” lifestyle for something more adventurous. On top of that, she was an independent traveler. She was the only Chinese friend of mine who had been all the way to Tibet, and she was already planning to go again.

When I knew them both back in Sanming, Ruirui (the friend Jess and I met in Xi’an) called her the only “Chinese foreigner” in Sanming.

The front of the Lashihai hostel.

But now that I had met Shūlěi here in Lìjiāng, she seemed even more independent. Perhaps traveling does that to all of us, but the difference was striking. She seemed preoccupied with getting to Tibet, and a little bit stressed out by the preparations. She had told me earlier that they were planning on spending more than 3000 yuan each for the trip, which I knew was probably almost two months’ salary for an average employee at the university (somewhere north of $450).

We walked further our into the marsh and eventually I took off my flip flops, because they had become completely laden in mud, and Shūlěi continually urged me to put them back on until she took hers off herself and realized how much easier it was to walk without them, and we walked, our feet covered in thick layers of mud, until we reached the end of the muddy path and the lake began.

Some Chinese boys rowed close to us on a long blue boat made of blue aluminum, 15 feet long and heavy, with a deep puddle of water in the bottom.

The boys in the boat at Lashihai.

“You guys wanna go for a ride?” Shūlěi asked.

“No, let’s not bother,” I said.

The four boys rowed closer. We could see that they were dressed in colorful athletic shirts, one in a bright yellow Kappa jersey, and wore dirty but not cheap pants and shoes. They were deeply tan and laughing and joking in the boat, apparently out fishing, and as they got closer they began calling “hello” at us. They got closer and Shūlěi called out to them in greeting.

“One person 30 yuan!” was their reply.

It was strange to hear. We were miles away from Lìjiāng, which itself was miles away from anything except mountains. But we hadn’t come far enough to escape the money-making impulse at the sight of visitors.

“You guys really know how to do business!” Shūlěi shouted back, laughing.

They rowed past us.

“Can you get in here?” She called, as the water seemed too shallow to get to solid land.

Yeah, they shouted back, as if it were completely obvious and she must be a little dim for asking.

“How do you get to land?” She asked.

“We just go in here,” they said, giving that peculiar Chinese answer to her question — the one that answers nothing, that gives no information, but simply makes the questioner seem ignorant.

The muck on our feet made it impossible to walk in flip-flops.

We walked back and then went to the hostel, and washed our feet. We sat around for a while and Shūlěi told me about the animals in the hostel. There was a dog called Bājiè, Pigsy, from Xīyóujì, the classic Chinese tale about a monk who travels to India to retrieve the sacred Buddhist scriptures. The dog was huge and black and did not look like a pig but like a monster to me, after the episode in Sìchuān. Then there was another dog, a chocolate lab named Prince, and then a small tabby orange cat named Iron Bullet, Tiědàn, because she had been the only of her litter to survive

“Pigsy watched prince grow up,” Shūlěi explained, “so when Prince was a puppy Pigsy was really protective, even bite people. Actually he doesn’t bite people unless he’s protecting Prince, but one time he used too much force and hurt someone,” she said.

Suddenly I became very aware of how close Jess was to the big dog. “Maybe we should get going,” I said.

We headed back to town by car, getting a ride from a wealthy couple who had a television in their black four door sedan, installed in the dashboard. They dropped us off on the side of the road and we transferred to the van of Shūlěi and Píngpíng’s friend, Límíng, meaning “dawn”–and then he took us to Shùhé village, where we watched people dancing around a large fire in the small village square. The Chinese people had a conga line going in a huge circle around the 10 meter bonfire, tourists all, except for a group of five very pretty Chinese girls dressed in ethnic attire and looking uncomfortably and unsmilingly at the squirming masses of tourists around them. A few police officers stood inside the ring making sure nobody got too close to the fire.

The bonfire in Shuhe Old Village to celebrate the Torch Festival.

Jess and I watched for a while as Shūlěi and Píngpíng danced. It seemed fun, but I didn’t trust Chinese tourists around a huge fire, no matter how many policemen were there, and anyway dancing has never been my strong suit.

After the fire, we walked back to the van with Shūlěi and Píngpíng and Límíng, and on the way we bought several of the hand-made tie died tablecloths from a vendor in the town, Shūlěi and Píngpíng bargaining doggedly on our behalf while Límíng waited outside. Then we walked back to the van and Shūlěi realized that Límíng wanted to go back to his place the opposite way from the way we had come in, so taking us back wasn’t convenient.

So we said goodbye in the parking lot, some weird distance in the air between us, maybe because none of us knew if we would see each other again, and because we had only had a chance to meet for this one day, while all of us were planning to go elsewhere.

They would start their journey to Tibet the next day, and I couldn’t go with them. This was because of the ban on foreigners in effect this summer (potential political unrest in Tibet) and because you couldn’t get in anyway even if you were allowed, because foreigners had to go with a tour group.

Jess and I walked back through Shùhé to get a taxi back to our hostel. I was tired again and a bit sorry to say goodbye to Shūlěi and Píngpíng so soon. But the next day we were heading out for Tiger Leaping Gorge, which promised to be one of the best parts of our trip. And turned out to be by far the best place I’ve been in China so far.

And I’ll write about that in the next installation of this travel log. It might take a few days for me to get to it, though, as I’m in the middle of a transition to Xiamen at the moment and time is limited. Saying goodbye to another place even as I write this travel log—and finding that it takes as long to record these adventures as it does to live them.

Next: Tiger Leaping Gorge (Hǔtiàoxiá), the one place we visited on our whole trip that I can't complain about even a little.

After we left Xi’an we headed south to Sichuan, where things got a little crazy. Sichuan is deeper into western China than I had ever been before. It is known for its very spicy food, for its relatively underdeveloped economy, for its gnarly and nearly impossible-to-understand version of Chinese, and, as I’ve been told time and again by Chinese friends, for its beautiful women.

It is also known for the horrific earthquake that struck there in 2008, killing more than 60,000 people.

As we approached Sichuan on an overnight train from Xi’an, I had all of these things in mind, particularly the spicy food and pretty women. I was also thinking of Jiuzhaigou Valley, which is known for its incredibly blue water and beautiful mountains. My friend Jack had been to Jiuzhaigou the year before, and he said it must be the most beautiful place in the world. I figured it must be an exaggeration—this was coming from a man who had never left mainland China.

Unfortunately, we had a huge obstacle before we could get to Jiuzhaigou: a 12-hour daytime bus ride from Chengdu.

The twelve-hour bus ride from Chengdu to Jiuzhaigou Valley is rough. But there's no other way to do it unless you're willing to shell out the $300 for the 40-minute flight.

Before I continue with the story I should insert a caveat: Anyone who reads this who is thinking of traveling to Jiuzhaigou should know that you can travel directly there from Xi’an by bus. You don’t need to go to Chengdu first. But we did because I didn’t know this fact before we left.

Anyway, after a day in Chengdu (unremarkable place, no pretty women), we set out in the early morning by bus for Jiuzhaigou (“zhai” rhymes with fly and gou sounds just like “go”), and crammed into our seats. The bus had a few other foreigners on it but was mostly Chinese. This made sense. The plane tickets to Jiuzhaigou were 2000 yuan round trip (over $300) while the bus tickets were $45 round trip.

The scenery was some of the best I've seen anywhere, which makes the question--is it worth it??--hard to answer.

The problem with these bus rides, besides the fact that you have to sit on a miserable bus all day, is that they always stop at these sham places for lunch that serve terrible food for too much money. The passengers tend to accept this meekly, with no complaints.

But after going to Jiuzhaigou (which was beautiful—I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves), a passenger decided to make a stand.

We pulled over for lunch around 1 p.m. in a decent little cafeteria. Jess and I glanced at the food, but it all looked really spicy and neither of us were very hungry, so we decided not to eat and I just got us a soda. We sat in the back of the dining hall quietly and rested; we would all have to get on the bus soon.

But then a heavy-set Chinese man in a lime green shirt started arguing loudly with the woman at the cashier. At first I had trouble understanding what they were shouting about, but after a minute I picked up the problem: The man had taken one tray of food for he and his daughter to eat, thinking that it would only count as one meal when he paid the check. But he had no such luck.

The most remarkable part of the valley is the water--astonishingly blue, which is caused by some kind of agent that remains in the water from when this valley was carved out by glaciers.

Unfortunately this is just how these places work. You get food as soon as you walk in the door—they practically shove it on you—but you don’t pay until after you’ve eaten. Invariably the price is 50 percent more than what it should be, which usually only amounts to an American dollar so I tend not to complain, but it annoys even me.

This guy was furious. He had paid for two overpriced meals when he felt that he had only taken one. And he was not backing down. At all. After a flurry of initial stern disagreeing with the stocky middle aged woman behind the counter, he let go and started shouting at her. He told her he wasn’t going to pay. He argued that they were cheating him and everyone else in the place. He shouted. She shouted back. A skinny looking young guy started looking at him sternly, but let the woman do most of the shouting.

The man’s daughter was still sitting quietly in the back of the cafeteria while all this was going on, no longer touching her food. And soon the man came back to her and stood by her while he continued the shouting match. At this point other passengers from the bus started peeking into the door of the cafeteria to see what all the commotion was. Some people who were already inside smiled sheepishly at the man’s antics. Some people simply stared ahead quietly.

I expected the man to scream a lot and then pay, which is what usually happens. But it went on for about five minutes with no clear end in sight, the woman holding firm, the man nearly choking on his anger. The argument waxed and waned as these kinds of public Chinese arguments do, punctuated by occasional awkward silences where each party gauged the steadfastness of the other. There was a brief lull and then a sudden burst of shouting from the man. By this time I had pretty much started to ignore the both of them and just tried to enjoy not being on the bus.

Then I heard a loud crash, and a shout from the man, and from the corner of my eye I saw a burst of color as the man’s tray of food flew threw the air towards Jess and me. The guy had decided he didn’t want to eat after all, and had slashed the food off the table, apparently in the direction he thought no people were in. Except that there were two foreigners there, sitting in the dark corner of the cafeteria.

There are also some really nice Tibetan villages within the park, which you can stay in if you ask around surreptitiously after you arrive in the town outside the park. There are ways to do it--I saw it done by a foreigner while we were there--but it's not legal and it's a bit sketchy. But still, it would be very cool if you had the time. Amazing, really.

Luckily, Jess served as a pretty good food-shield, so I didn’t get any on me. But she got a bit of a splattering of rice and little bits of carrot or pumpkin. The guy got up and continued his shouting, shoving his eight-year-old girl daughter out the door while he kept on arguing loudly.

Now there really was a crowd, everybody staring in that disturbing and silent Chinese way at the activity, faces impassive or smiling slightly.

Finally the young male proprietor just told the man to get out. He walked up to him and looked him in the eye and said, calmly, get out. Just get out, and after a few minutes of this the man indeed got out.

Jess and I went outside, her bemused, too, and she got on the bus. I lingered outside the bus for a moment and a Taiwanese guy, maybe about 45, whom I had noticed handling a passport on the bus that said “Republic of China” on the cover, chatted with me for a moment.

“Do you know what they were fighting about?” he asked in English.

“I think they were arguing because he was asked to pay for two meals when he only had one,” I replied in Chinese.

“Yeah, I think that’s about what it was,” he answered in Chinese. “But it’s a bit hard to understand why someone would go through so much over just a small bit of money.”

“Maybe he was doing it on behalf of all of us,” I said.

The Taiwanese guy smiled and asked me if I knew a certain Chinese idiom: gé mìng xiān liè. I had never heard it, so he explained it to me. The term means “martyr to the revolution”. This had been exactly how I had seen the guy in the green shirt, and even though his gesture had been ridiculous—splattering his food on the floor like a child—I understood how he felt. Traveling in China was always like this. Literally everywhere you turned, there were unscrupulous people trying to screw you out of money and ruining your travel. It was always obvious that the bus drivers got a take of these stops, but nobody complained. At least they never complained to anyone but themselves. Only the occasional person complained bitterly and endlessly. This was maddening to me.

Again, the lakes were amazing.

The Taiwanese guy’s English was pretty good, but he was busy most of the trip chatting with another Chinese passenger. We all got back on the bus, as if nothing had happened, and I commented how happy I was that at lest we didn’t get pelted with food.

“That’s because I was a shield to you,” Jess reminded me.

Throughout this ride, I hadn’t really thought of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake much. I knew it happened in Wenchuan, but I wasn’t sure where in Sichuan that was. I had noticed some cracked and oddly bent roads along the way, but I wasn’t sure if that was caused by earthquake or by construction.

Then, a few hours after lunch, suddenly nearly everyone on the bus sat up at the same time and bent their necks to look out the right windows, and my eyes followed theirs. Down in the bottom of a gorge that ran beside the road, maybe 100 meters deep, sat a row of buildings almost completely submerged in water. Suddenly the earthquake pops into my head, and I realize that we are in Wenchuan. There is a huge black sign with white lettering in the bottom of the gorge, and I recognize five characters before it zips by: Wènchuān Dà Dìzhèn. The Great Wenchuan Earthquake.

Jiuzhaigou Valley.

Suddenly signs of the earthquake are everywhere: We pass by a highway, originally on concrete 15-meter legs, that has completely collapsed into the river below us and is still lying there, running straight into the murky brown water where it disappears; a series of attractive luxury apartments, interrupted midway by a cluster of older buildings in the center, cracked at the foundation and resting at an awe-inspiring angle, as if the five-story buildings were water jugs that had the tablecloth pulled out from under them; a wrecked suspension bridge; tunnels that look too dark; roads that have been ripped in two like paper.

The scenery is fascinating in the terrible way that images of disaster are, and it is strange to think that this all happened three whole years ago. In some places it looks like it happened yesterday. But there has clearly been a lot of new construction here; there are new, shiny government buildings, new highways, new apartment complexes. One thing is still lacking: the reason it takes 12 hours to get to Jiuzhaigou is because the highway that was destroyed in the earthquake that led to Jiuzhaigou from Sichuan’s capital has yet to be rebuilt.

One weird thing you see when traveling to beautiful places in China: the tourists like to dress up in "local people" traditional clothing.

The scenery moves on, and we get closer to Chengdu, and the wreckage seems less. Then we stop for a rest at a grungy little gas station two hours outside the capital.

That was where karma reminded me that I was not invincible by throwing something completely unexpected at me, again, literally.

Everybody got off the bus and fanned outward, stretching their legs, smoking, chatting. I walked in the opposite direction as everybody else, curious to look down into the gorge below us. I noticed, about ten feet away from me, a very big, black, filthy dog laying in a big patch of dirt. This truck stop was the definition of the word shithole. The air was thick with smog, the place was too close to the road, and on top of that they had mangy looking dogs leaning against rusty sheds. But I didn’t pay the dog any mind. I just rested my eyes and stretched my legs, and then after a minute turned back to the bus to find Jess and chat with her.

From behind me, I heard a loud growling and a bark and the rustling of gravel, and without looking I knew to run. Or maybe leap desperately would be the right word, because that is what I did, and after about two steps I felt the dogs teeth grab onto the small bag I was holding, and hold onto it. Glancing over my shoulder I saw his bared teeth flashing at me, but something had held him back. I stumbled backward a few steps, yanking my bag out of his grip, and saw that he had been barely held back by a ten-foot chain. My bag was fine. But it was clear that if that had been my arm, I would not have been fine.

Jiuzhaigou Valley also has a lot of waterfalls.

Two Chinese men looked at me concerned and I explained I was OK and then marched to the place where the owners were selling overpriced water and soda and ice cream.

“Boss, your dog just tried to bite me,” I said. She looked a little surprised and looked me up and down. “He didn’t bite me, but got my bag.”

She smiled, and a few passengers around me laughed.

“It’s not funny,” I said angrily.

“I know,” she said. “Why were you near him?”

“I didn’t even see him,” I lied. I had seen him, but I hadn’t expected him to leap at me. He weighed about 90 pounds and had white and black fur and clearly hadn’t left his spot for a long time. “He tried to bite me,” I said again in frustration

An old woman in a classic breadbox-shaped dark blue cheap coat interrupted: “What were you doing over there?”

“I was just walking around relaxing,” I said. “It’s not funny!” I insisted again, angrily, and then I walked away, the driver and the others breaking into harder laughter. “Yeah, real funny!” I yelled over my shoulder, “really funny!”

Then I did what I’ve always done to calm down—went to my crutch and smoked a cigarette—and when Jess found me and asked me what flavor ice cream she should buy I said simply that a dog had tried to bite me and I didn’t know. She said sorry sympathetically, which was nice of her, and went to get her ice cream. I relaxed for a minute and went back to the shop.

We also paid the pandas a visit while we were in Chengdu; well worth it, just organized it through the hostel, which was easy and fine.

“That’s not safe. You should put the dog somewhere where it can’t bite people,” I said.

The old woman said: “That dog doesn’t bite people.”

“It just tried to bite me!” I said incredulously.

“He’s never seen a foreigner before,” the owner woman, about 40 in a white and black striped shirt, said.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, “it’s not safe.”

“It is safe,” the old woman said.

“It’s not safe!”

The owner lady gave me a few palliating words—yes, we’ll move him somewhere else, fine—and I said OK, and walked away, still shaking. The Taiwanese guy laughed with me for a moment; finally it did seem funny, if only because I hadn’t been hurt.

But I knew that if the dog had got me it could have been much worse. I had gotten away by a hair.

Back on the bus, Jess commented how the dog had actually been cute, and I asked her, as politely as possible, to stop talking. We tried to decide if it was a bad omen, and Jess decided that it was just karma balancing itself out; after all, she had been my shield for the food, and now I had been attacked by a huge dog. I felt OK with that explanation. We struggled to get comfy in our cramped seats and rode out the next two or so hours of the trip mostly in silence, thinking only of our hostel beds.

We had enjoyed Jiuzhaigou, but in the end I felt as though we could have gone somewhere else that would have required less work. Jess said she thought the bus ride was worth it, but it wasn’t for me. Jiuzhaigou was truly beautiful, like nothing else I’ve seen, but it is not the most beautiful place on earth, and it, like most of China in the summer, was a hotbed of Chinese tourists. After seeing it once I decided something I’ve decided in so many other places in China—nice, but I don’t need to ever go back.

Luckily that would finally change with out next destination—the most beautiful place I’ve seen in China and an area I would happily return to anytime; and also the second-to-last stop on the second epic journey through China: Yunnan!

Yunnan: If you like natural beauty, probably the next best place in China after Tibet.

Our plane landed in Xi’an in the late morning and we took a bus to the center of town, where we were able to walk to our hostel. About an hour later we met Ruirui, a young Chinese woman who I met at Sanming University and whose hometown was near Xi’an.

From left, Zhangrong, Ruirui, and Jess, outside the Terra Cotta Warriors.

Ruirui (pronounced, roughly, like two “Ray”s, “Ray Ray”) is about five three, with long dark hair (like almost all Chinese girls) that she generally keeps in a simple ponytail, and a round face that is virtually always smiling. She’s one of those people whose facial expressions are pretty much a perfect representation of whatever’s going on in her head. Her eyes are big and expressive and her personality can easily swing from loud and unrestrained to quiet and nearly shy.

I met Ruirui in one of the dining halls at the university when she was sitting with one of my friends, another teacher at the college, and they waved me over to sit down with them.

I immediately noticed a few things about Ruirui:

• Her Chinese was very standard (meaning that she came from the North, which meant that maybe she could teach me oral Chinese)
• She didn’t seem too freaked out by speaking to a foreigner, and it certainly didn’t make her shy
• She talked pretty much nonstop

These are all qualities I look for in a Chinese friend (and maybe even a friend in general). Trait one is important because it can be hard to learn new words from Fujianese, who are often unclear of the correct pronunciation themselves; traits two and three are important basically because I tend to be a kind of shy person, and am not always good at initiating conversation, so people who like talking tend to get along well with me. (Strangely, I think maybe the opposite is true with me and romantic relationships; maybe I avoid being the center of attention in friendships, and like to be the center of attention in relationships? I don’t know; I’ll have to leave one to sort out another day…)

Amazing street food! Made of potatoes (I think), tasted like turkey stuffing with a bit more bite. Even Jess liked it.

So a couple of weeks after meeting her I sent Ruirui a message asking if she could teach me Chinese. She agreed, I think with no intention of ever actually teaching me, but happy to hang out and chat with me, which is close enough to teaching, especially at that time, almost a year ago when I was just starting to be competent in long-form conversations.

And from there we became good friends. We hung out at least once a week in Sanming, usually just grabbing a bite to eat, sometimes going for a walk somewhere or checking out some part of Sanming. (I was often a guide to her on those outings, having been in Sanming a year longer and more familiar with the area, which she always found funny – the laowai showing her around.) Perhaps the fact that Ruirui was new to southern China made her a better friend, too. She often talked about differences between the South and the North that made it clear that she missed home.

A cast of some armored horses that were found in Shaanxi. Xi'an is all about old stuff. Throughout the entire stretch of Chinese history, Xi'an has served as the capital of China for more years than Beijing. It's a cornucopia of old.

Rèqíng was a word I had heard used before to describe people from the north, and Ruirui used it often to describe people from her home province, Henan. Hénánrén gèng rèqíng (rèqíng is pronounced something like RUH-ching), she would say. Henanese are more reqing. It’s a bit difficult to understand, this word—the dictionary says: enthusiasm, zeal, warmth. But this is a fairly Chinese idea, this word. It’s just two characters—hot, and sentiment—put together to form a word. It evokes a feeling of very proactive friendliness and insistence in my mind. There can be connotations of politeness in the word, as in, Northerners are more friendly and polite than southerners. If you come to visit me in the North and I take you out to eat and insist that you get totally pissed on rice liquor, that is reqing. If I fight over the check for ten minutes with a friend, that is reqing. If I am a street food vendor, and treat all of my customers fairly and generally smile and act nice, I am reqing. You can be reqing to your friends by being very hospitable and (in the Chinese way) very pushy in your politeness—refuse to let them pay the bill, literally grab their hand and thrust their wallet or whatever back into their pocket, follow table manners precisely and toast them in the correct order, always insist that when eating they have the seat of honor, when taking pictures they are in the center. This is treating your friend very reqing.

This is the place where the tomb containing the thousands of terra cotta warriors was discovered in the 1970s by some farmers digging in the earth.

Reqing, in other words, is a kind of Chinese ideal. And whenever I became close to someone from the north, they eventually told me that northerners were more reqing than southerners. Not having spoken to anyone from the south living in the north about this, I don’t know if people in the opposite situation would say the same. But it was clear, within moments of meeting up with my friend Ruirui, that she was going to aim the giant cannon of Chinese manners at my cousin and I and unleash a barrage of politeness that would leave us battered and confused and feeling waited-on to the point of total embarrassment.

Ruirui had enlisted a friend, Zhangrong, to accompany us with her boyfriend to go sightseeing in Xi’an, and they quickly met up with us as well. Then the five of us all went to the Muslim district of Xi’an to get some street food.

This is one of the famous things to do in Xi’an – go get some of the various street foods made by the Hui people. They’re also known as “Chinese Muslims”, one of the largest groups of “ethnic minority peoples” in China. They make some mean food. Naturally, Ruirui, Zhangrong and Zhangrong’s boyfriend wouldn’t let us pay for anything. This can be exhausting, especially when you know the person buying you food doesn’t have a whole lot of money herself. At one point, Jess wanted to buy a soda, so she hung back secretly while the rest of us went ahead. I actually tried to distract the group from her so she could buy the soda herself. But Zhangrong’s boyfriend saw our scheme from a mile away, and snuck into the shop where Jess was buying the soda, and paid for it, all without her noticing that he was even there.

We walked around for the afternoon and in the evening had dinner, and then the next day went to the Terra Cotta Warriors exhibit, a massive, crowded historical relic, the tomb of one of China’s earliest emperor’s, QinShiHuang. As usual with these kinds of things, I wasn’t that interested in the Terra Cotta Warriors, and it was at this place that I started to wonder why, if I don’t care at all about major tourist attractions, I even bothered. And then I decided that I didn’t know. And then I decided, just like that, that I wouldn’t do this anymore—go to major, famous historical relics like this. Because it was basically a waste of my time.

The Terra Cotta Warriors in Xi'an. The place is massive.

Don’t mistake my meaning: I did not decide not to travel. I decided not to travel to places like this. I love travel. I love learning new cultures, the new food and sights and sensations, the constant motion, the exhilarating rush of landing in a new place and figuring it all out. I love the sense of change. I love the new perspective you get, instantly, when you see something new, and I love the fresh view of your life back home that it gives you. I love the way it sharpens my vision and my mind, and brings the world down to a manageable size and speed. I love the encounters you make, the unpredictability of life on the road.

But coming to places like this—The Terra Cotta Warriors, The Forbidden City, places that you had to spend days to get to, competing all the while with tens of thousands of other tourists all crawling through a blazing summer day to see the same bloody old relic—was not about all those things I mentioned above. It wasn’t about anything at all, as far as I could tell, except seeing something with your eyes that is no more impressive (to me) than a picture in a book. And you don’t learn anything. The thing about these historical relics, that actually makes them look smaller to me, in real life, is that they are emblems of so much history and meaning, but that you don’t get any of that just by visiting them. You can learn way more about the Great Wall by reading a book than you could by visiting it. That’s not to say it’s not worth seeing, but sometimes that transcendent experience that you want is impossible, at least in China, because there are so many people. If The Forbidden City had 100,000 less people in it on a day, it would be amazing to see. Were it possible to see an empty room there and stand there, in the quiet, and imagine what it was like 300 years ago, I would go again. But going there and literally having to struggle to avoid being pushed to the ground because the crowds are so bad, standing in lines in the hot sun for hours just to get in, dealing with the loudness and the rudeness (line-cutting is rampant) of the Chinese tourists. It’s not worth it. My time is worth more than that.

Biking on the Xi'an city wall was definitely one of the highlights of the Xi'an experience.

Such with the Terra Cotta Warriors. There was a white guy with a little red-and-blue action figure, who was reaching beyond the fence and placing the action figure inside the bounds of the 2000-year-old relic, on the old ashy-looking soil where the emporer’s tomb had rested untouched and lost for centuries, till it was unearthed by a group of farmers in 1974. It was a stupid little action figure, and the guy was obviously doing some kind of take-a-picture-of-my-action-figure-all-over-the-world thing. It looked like a mini Captain America, a little guy holding a silver-colored plastic gun, about two inches tall.

I chuckled at first when I saw what he was doing, and then a late-middle-aged Chinese woman walked by him, while he was snapping pictures, and scowled angrily and spat: “That’s inappropriate! He shouldn’t be putting an American figure there!” And then she walked away.

My first reaction to this was shock, but it only took a second for me to realize that she was right: this was an ancient Chinese relic; it was inappropriate to put anything on the soil, obviously, especially a little plastic American figurine. I imagined somebody going to the Lincoln Memorial, running up to it (even though that would be impossible), and putting a Mao Zedong plush doll on his foot, or something. The thought was kind of funny, but it would definitely piss a lot of Americans off to see something like that.

The amazing Zhangrong, biking with us on the wall.

I also noticed that Ruirui’s face was clearly a little uncomfortable, so I said I would say something to him about it, and she was clearly relieved.

So I delivered the news with a bit of the bluntness of the Chiense woman’s tone of voice: “I don’t know if you can understand Chinese, but you’re pissing people off doing that,” I said. “Some lady just walked by and said it’s not appropriate.”

“Oh,” he said, looking startled suddenly, “thanks for telling me, I had no idea. I’ve been doing this all over the world.”

“Yeah, I know what you’re doing, but it seems like other people might not understand,” I said.

He just thanked me and then put the little action figure away, and this made me feel kind of guilty. I had expected an unfriendly encounter with the guy, or had expected him to make some kind of insensitive comment about the woman’s response to what he was doing, but he turned out to just be gentle and slightly embarrassed.

Proudly displaying our tickets to the Shaanxi ancient history museum.

Yet another reason to avoid big relics like this altogether—it’s just another place for Chinese and foreigners to collide: the Chinese generally self-conscious about the fact that foreigners who live in China have the time and money to see more of these things than they do; the foreigners generally walking around sometimes actually appalled by the culture around them, more often simply understanding little.

Hanging out with Ruirui and Zhangrong, however, made the stay in Xi’an more than worthwhile. Neither of them spoke more than the most basic English, so my time with them was a constant flow of new words and Chinese phrases, and my expanding ability to talk with them felt good. There were times when my cousin had to remind me that she was there so that I would translate for her what was going on, and I feel guilty that she couldn’t take part more in the conversations, but I think, with me translating and with Ruirui taking the occasional bold opportunity to practice her English, she was able to get a general idea for who these people are.

We only stayed in Xi’an for about three days, and with the rest of our time we hung out and ate a lot with Ruirui and Zhangrong, went to the “largest musical fountain in Asia” and played in the water, rented bikes and rode for about an hour and a half around the amazing and enormous old city wall that surrounds Xi’an, and went to the Shaanxi ancient history museum, which Zhangrong made memorable by walking with me through the whole museum and pummeling my brain to pudding by giving explanations, in rapid-fire Chinese, of nearly every relic in the place.

On our last day in Xi’an we went to see Ruirui at her university, the Shaanxi Science and Technology University, a massive university with about 20,000 students that was, because of summer vacation, a huge ghost town about an hour outside of Xi’an.

Ruirui's dormitory, which she shared with three other graduate students.

We took the bus out to the university. When we arrived it was early afternoon and deathly hot. We stood on the side of the road, the cicadas whining like overtaxed lawnmowers, and I called Ruirui. She met us outside and together we went to get some food in a small, grungy restaurant on the campus. After lunch we walked across campus to see the new library. Ruirui told me that the school had borrowed tens of millions of yuan in order to build the new facility, but that there were hardly any books in it yet, because they spent too much on the building.

“So now they have to raise tuition for all the undergraduates,” she said, laughing, “because they built too nice of a library.”

We walked through the suffocating heat and took a couple of pictures in front of the library, my cousin and I looking limp in the sun, and then walked back to Ruirui’s dormitory, where she had lived with three other women while she worked on her master’s degree in animation.

She didn’t live there much anymore, because she had been at Sanming University teaching, but it was clear that four women had lived there as graduate students, four loft beds made out of steel with desk units under them, clothes hangers hanging from the edges, only a small closet in the corner, cheaply painted walls, and a small sunny balcony area with a sink and a squatter toilet with a shower head in it.

The hallway on this level was perhaps 80 meters long, with maybe 50 apartments just like this one on the third floor of the building, the units for graduate students at the university slightly cushier than the dorms for undergrads, where they lived six or eight to a room.

Ruirui pulled out a book of her sketches and sat with Jess for a moment, showing her the drawings while I sat next to them translating back and forth.

And Ruirui herself, with the obligatory peace sign (which in China everybody says is a V for "Victory").

“These are from really early on,” Ruirui said modestly as Jess turned the pages. “They’re not so good looking.”

“No, they look really nice,” Jess said.

“I can’t draw very well,” Ruirui went on. “But I have another notebook of drawings that are better than these.”

“Can I see it?” Jess asked.

“It’s at home,” Ruirui said. Jess continued flipping through the pages. The sketches were mostly human figures and faces, drawn with competence but not necessarily mastery, the early work of a dedicated art student. “I can’t draw well,” Ruirui said again.

Channeling Ruirui’s modesty was strange for me: translating someone’s words when I understood that they were just cross-cultural noise. In China folks generally don’t say they’re good at anything. This is part of Chinese “politeness”. If someone compliments you on anything, even if you are great at it, you just say you’re terrible at it, and they generally accept that response.

After sitting in front of the fan in Ruirui’s room for 20 minutes, we headed back out into the sun and then went back to town, flagging down a cab. Ruirui was leaving Xi’an before us to go back to her hometown in Henan, and we went to the train station together.

Ruirui had meant to leave after us, but I had mistaken the time of our departure, so we said goodbye to her in the center of the train station, surrounded by the cacophony of thousands of people filling every corner of the place, hundreds sitting on the floor on newspapers that they had spread out, many snacking on sunflower seeds, many napping, all somehow impervious to the overwhelming noise and chaos of the place.

On the bus with our friends.

Ruirui turned to Jess and said, in carefully thought-out and pronounced English, “I am very happy to meet you,” and then they hugged and Jess thanked her.

I hugged Ruirui too, suddenly aware that we were finished with Xi’an and still had several places to see and two or three weeks left of our trip. But it felt like we had been in Xi’an a long time and going to Chengdu, our next destination, seemed a bit of a lonesome prospect after being at the blunt end of Ruirui’s very reqing personality for four days.

I thanked Ruirui and she hurried off to her train, and Jess waited with our bags while I went off to find food for our 15-hour train ride. A little bit of the stress came back—you’re going to Sichuan; what are you going to do there, buddy? was the dialogue in my brain—but before long we were jogging along the train platform, struggling with bags that just got heavier with presents as the journey rolled along, and when we got on the train again and started rolling, the stress was gone again. In Sichuan we would see Jiuzhaigou, which a Chinese friend had once described to me as the most beautiful place he had ever seen.

After I left Xi’an Zhangrong kept in touch with me by text message, and at one point I mentioned that I would miss Jess when she went back home. Zhangrong sent me back this message:

“We have a saying in Chinese: Now you’re ‘someone who has left his home behind’. There will definitely be times when you’ll feel lonely. The life here isn’t the same; your friends aren’t the same. When Jess goes home of course you’ll be sorry to see her go. If you like, we can be your family in China. And if you don’t go home for the New Year holiday, you’re welcome to come back to Xi’an or to my hometown and spend it there. We would really welcome you!”

Zhangrong, in fact, is from the South, Hunan Province. So I felt, after reading this message, that I had proof that indeed, southerners could be reqing, too. There was little chance that I would be able to go to Xi’an again, but Zhangrong, like Ruirui, was just very friendly and maybe curious, and just happy to spend time with us. There was no other reason for her to play host to us for three days. This was the kind of thing, for me, more than things like The Forbidden City or the Great Wall, or even the amazing food, that always made China worthwhile. A good place to be. Americans, of course, can be reqing too, but it was particularly meaningful to receive this kind of a welcome from someone so different from us, and from so far away.

That night, our first night on a train, we both slept a little fitfully, but the best of our trip was yet to come. Sichuan and Yunnan, we were about to learn, had the north beat hands-down in terms of travel.

But I’ll get to that tomorrow, when we go to…Chengdu, the spiciest city in China.

Next stop: Sichuan! Tibetan towns, and some real natural beauty.

I picked up my cousin the next morning in the Beijing airport, and she was hungry, so we made the obvious choice for her first meal in China: Burger King.

My cuz took a direct flight from San Francisco, but for some reason they had a parking lot walk-thru deplaning experience. This led her to believe, until we flew from Yunnan to Shanghai, that in China they didn't have those gates that connect directly to the plane.

This was my first chance to have the BK in China, and it was exactly the same as back in the U.S. Definitely flame grilled. Definitely too much mayonnaise. Definitely at least 7,000 calories per burger.

Here’s the funny thing about Western food in China: Chinese people, in general, don’t eat it. (Some Chinese people love McDonald’s and eat there every day, I know, but for the most part, no.) And the funny thing is that they generally have the same reaction to Western food that Westerners have to Chinese food.

Like this: You go to China, and somebody orders lunch and they order chicken claws. Or duck’s blood. Or fish air bladder. And put it on the table. Think of three things: what would be the expression on your face? What would you be thinking? What would you feel about eating these things?

We ate our fair share of fast food, like any good goddamn American.

I’m pretty sure most Westerner’s internal reaction would be a quickened heart-rate and the thought, blaring through their mind: Oh my god I can’t eat that what am I supposed to eat!?

OK, my point: This is the reaction many Chinese have when they see these things: Cheese, chips, pasta. They look at it like it’s dog food, and you are an asshole for even considering eating it.

So when my cousin started describing her eating habits back home, and her passion for Burger King, and particularly when she mentioned that her boyfriend goes to Burger King so often the servers have memorized his order, I knew that this trip was not going to be about exploring the many wonderful dimensions of Chinese food.

Which is, honestly, 50 percent of the reason for coming to China. For battling the crowds. For dealing with rudeness in the street and an incomprehensible language. For dealing with pollution and tourist destinations that take days to get to. The reason, so many days, is just food. You can get some of the most amazing food on earth here for dirt cheap. Some of the weirdest snails, fish, food that’s spicy or mild, barbecue that will strip your stomach lining, noodle soup that will put the color back in your face. If you’re interested in food, and you’re willing to take risks, the palette of flavors here will blow your mind. And the joy of discovering new and weird foods after being here for years and trying everything will never cease. It’s awesome. I’m not even a “foodie” – whatever the hell that term means – and I love it.

On the high-speed rail from the airport to the big city.

But if your idea of a good meal is a Burger King #3 with sweet and sour sauce (and I have nothing against that diet choice; everybody has the right to choose his or her own food), you are not going to enjoy it. You are probably not going to eat anything weird by Chinese standards.

Anyway, we ate Burger King. And then we got on the high speed train back to the city. And then we got on the subway and began to slog through the unbelievable crowds. Jess and I spent about five days in Beijing, and by the end of it both of us were literally afraid of the subway. It was so packed that we both had immediate feelings of fear and despair whenever we saw a subway entrance. I didn’t realize this was happening until the end of the trip, otherwise we would have taken more cabs, but such is life.

That first day we didn’t do much; we got communications set up with home so that Jess could let everyone know she had arrived safe, and chilled out. I was feeling sick from some super spicy noodles I had eaten the day before anyway, so I didn’t mind.

Jess’s first night in China was somewhat like everyone’s: she got to sleep OK but woke up several times in the night, and woke up very early in the morning. I was still passed out so she passed the time quietly, and eventually I woke up and we tried to find breakfast.

Our beautiful hostel, the Beijing Templeside Guest House.

That day after we got up and about we decided to go check out the 798 arts district in Beijing, which was a long street full of galleries displaying art that ranged from OK to Good. There was nothing spectacular, but it was interesting to see what modern Chinese art consists of nowadays. The street included a gallery that showed posters of North Korean propaganda, most of it old. Posters displayed North Korean soldiers aiming guns at Americans and Japanese. My favorite featured a Korean peasant woman standing with her arms outstretched, between her arms a pile of food—bread, canned goods, beverages, and what looks like canned meat—with the caption: “Corn is the raw material for many products” (in Korean).

The Temple of Heaven has got to be one of the most peaceful places in Beijing. That is, if you slip away from this part, the touristy section, and walk through the huge park that surrounds it and see all the old folks sitting alone practicing erhu and other instruments, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups.

This gallery was small and weird, and taking photos of the posters weren’t allowed. There was a private room just off the small gallery where a Chinese man was standing, evidently sorting through papers. The room was full of piles of propaganda materials and relics that had come from Korea.

I said hello and let myself into his office.

“These are all from North Korea?” I asked in Chinese.

“Yes,” he said.

“Are they old or new?”

“They’re all old,” he said.

“How did you get them here?” I asked.

“I went to North Korea,” he said.

He was a middle aged man, handsome and tall for a Chinese, maybe five feet eight. Obviously he was pretty terse when it came to talking about his business.

“You went there yourself?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Is that difficult to do?” I asked, a little incredulous.

“Yes,” he said.

“How did you do it?” I asked.

I cannot overemphasize how great the Templeside was...pity it's going to close.

“Yeah, it was a big pain. It was really hard. But it’s business,” he said. “Just business.” As if that explained everything.

I nodded and left his office. After two years in China I guess I’ve become used to this level of response from folks, even about topics that are super interesting: One or two words, something vague and meaningless. Most American collectors of old things like this would be happy to smother you with information about the object of their obsession, but this Chinese guy could only spare five or six words. Oh well, there was nothing I could do about it. I bought an overpriced postcard showing a reproduction of one of the photos and we headed back to the hostel.

Gotta love propaganda. One thing I like about America: despite the fact that most of us are idiots, at least we don't fall for this crap.

That night we had dinner with Natasha and Nick, Beijing style hotpot, which was great (although Jess, naturally, couldn’t eat it). We went back to the hostel to get ready for the Forbidden City, which turned out to be a small disaster.

We slept in the next day and got to the Forbidden City late, and it was a teeming mass of screaming people, basically. The Forbidden City is enormous and expensive and hot, and it turns out that if you go there in the summer, you should get there at opening time in the morning or literally do not bother to go at all. It’s horrible. Please take this as a warning: go early in the morning or do not go. Again, it was horrible.

But I won’t write much more than that here, because this is just the number 1 tourist attraction in China, or maybe number 2 after the Great Wall. So there’s no need to write anything. Some people love it, some hate it. I fall on the hate side. It’s loud and crowded and miserable, and the tour guides spout meaningless drivel about the place. (This all wasn’t quite clear to me last year, but now I am certain of the diagnosis.)

The Forbidden City: not forbidden anymore, but maybe it should be, because it is tourist hell.

We went back to the hostel after an endless day of crawling through the Forbidden City, and relaxed. Beijing, and China in general in the summer, is full of cicadas, which form a huge roaring sound in the hot noontime sun. We realized that Emma, the girl in the hostel in Beijing, had bought a pet cicada and was keeping it in a small cage hanging from one of the small trees in the courtyard of our hostel. I chatted with Bobby, one of the owners and she told me that the hostel would be renovated. She told me that the hostel, prior to their occupancy, had been a home for several families. The center of the courtyard had been full of small brick structures that people also lived in. But soon it would all be torn down.

I asked Emma what she thought of this, curious at how the people who worked here would feel about this courtyard house (which was originally hundreds of years old but which had been renovated over the years anyway) being rebuilt. “I think it’s good,” she said. “When they’re done it will be better.”

The cicada in the tiny cage that the hostel kept...just for kicks. Emma said they fed him cucumber, and his name was "Guoguo", and it seemed like she spent a lot of time shushing him. Cicadas are loud.

So we soldiered on. The next day we tried to go to the Great Wall, but couldn’t make it because we got started too late, so we tried to go to the military museum, but it was closed on Mondays, so we went to the Temple of Heaven, which was nice. That night I went to a club with Natasha and Nick called “Chocolate”, a Russian club in Beijing that offers live music (in Russian) every night. The place was only half-full but it was awesome. The music was really good and we got a hookah for pretty cheap, the drinks were OK and they actually got me to dance, which happens once every time an angel in heaven gets killed by the devil, who punishes those on earth in celebration (by making them see me dance; usually three or four angels have to die to make me sing in public).

The next day we went to the Great Wall. We went to Mutianyu Great Wall, which is the one I would recommend. It’s not so complicated to get to. You take a public bus to a small city outside Beijing called Huairou, and then when you get to Huairou you hop off the bus anywhere and get into one of the cabbies offering rides to Mutianyu. It’s 20 yuan per person, or something like that. The ride is nice, and I remembered it from the year before. One thing we did that was new was go up the side of the wall that had a SLIDE you could ride down. This is, I have little doubt, the best slide in the world. Do not go to Beijing without doing it.

The Great Wall -- beautiful and worthwhile, as always.

And that was Beijing. We had dinner with Nataha and Nick again our last night there, and we left them at the subway. Natasha waved to us as our train pulled away, and she kept waving for a really long time. The last thing she said was, “It was nice being China buddies with you.”

For some reason when I travel, I get “emotions”, which meant that I was really sad to see them go. Natasha in particular had been one of my favorite people in China, but now she was leaving. And we were leaving Beijing. And soon I would be moving away from Sanming. Traveling boils your life down to two basic experiences: movement and change. And those can be two of the toughest experiences to deal with, as well as two of the best. So after 5 days in Beijing I felt, weirdly, like I didn’t really want to leave.

But there were things ahead in Xi’an, namely these: friends, food, and things to see. So we went to bed (it seemed like Jess was acclimating to the time change) and got ready the next day for our flight to Xi’an, several hundred miles west of Beijing, the old capital of China.

Tomorrow: Xi'an!

Starting at the end of June, I left Sanming for Beijing to meet my cousin, Jess. Our plan was to spend a little under a month traveling around China, starting in Beijing and then heading west to Xi’an, and then proceeding southwest to Sichuan and Yunnan, and finally ending up in Shanghai, where we would say goodbye.

Before I left, I took some last photos of the building in Sanming where I taught for the last two years -- and where I won't be teaching anymore, as I'm moving onto the bigger, more developed city of Xiamen in southern Fujian

As happened last year when I was getting ready to go, I had too much to do in Sanming before my departure date, or anyway it seemed that way. I also suffered from the inevitable  Trip anxiety about everything going well on the trip. It always goes this way for me, whether I’m leaving for a weekend or a month. Before I go, I get anxious. This anxiety is all-consuming and results in me sleeping poorly, thinking constantly about the trip, and spending hours on the computer making inconsequential decisions, like whether to buy a train ticket directly from one city to the next or a bus ticket from the big city to a smaller city midway in order to avoid flooding in the area. These sessions online searching for tickets also inevitably end in me making a random decision, since perfect knowledge is impossible from home. When you travel, sometimes you just have to go for it.

I realize that this whole stress experience is something a lot of people don’t have when they’re planning a trip – they just go for and make the plunge and their upcoming trip is a huge thing to look forward to. Perhaps it’s a testament to how cushy my life is in China that a big trip becomes a bigger source of anxiety than anything else going on in my life. I find, however, that usually within about 12 hours of leaving home my stress basically disappears. This is an incredibly weird phenomenon: I feel stressed out, very stressed out, about traveling, right up until the moment I actually leave. And then once I am out the door and have put a fair distance between me and home, the stress is completely gone. Yeah, completely gone. Not just lingering or dissipating, but disappeared. Like a nightmare that you vanquish simply by waking up.

The stress was gone for me, on this trip, right around the time my train from Fujian Province was within an hour of Shanghai. I had spent the evening on the train relaxing and reading and chatting with a young college student on the train. He was going to school at Tongji University. He was friendly and seemed perfectly happy to chat with me in Chinese until his head turned blue, which is one of the best things about riding on the train in China, if you’re studying Chinese. We chatted most of the morning and then I started to notice the marshy outlands of Shanghai out the train window late in the morning. We were going to arrive in Shanghai a bit before noontime, and around ten was when I noticed that we were passing through what looked like an endless swamp. Small agricultural villages floated by, and it seemed that every house we passed was flanked by a water border of some kind. Mostly it was rivers or creeks, with frequent fields of rice flooding across the flat land. Buildings were small and concrete, with gabled roofs. I saw almost no one in the fields and the sun barely burned through the thick smog that clouded the air.

This is a photo of the 2008 class's classroom. They took all there classes here. Above the blackboard in the back of the room it says "Where there is a will there is a way." Get it? Will? That was great for my ego in my moments of teacher's desperation.

When we were about an hour from Shanghai I wrapped up my talk with the college kid, and he asked if we could exchange phone numbers. This is something that happens with almost every random Chinese person I talk to and never results in any further contact between us, but I gave him my number anyway and he gave me his. He told me to call him if I wanted to go see Tongji University; he would be happy to show me around.

When we arrived in the Shanghai train station I briefly felt a little bit of the panic and stress I had felt back home when I had been planning the trip, as I realized that I hadn’t planned how to get to my hostel from the train station. Then I remembered that I had Google maps on my phone, which allowed me to simply check the bus route to my destination, from wherever I happened to be. Oh yeah, that was why I hadn’t planned how to get there. It was also one of the huge advantages of traveling in China as a resident. I met so many foreigners on the trip who had no phone, no map, spoke no Chinese, had no easy way of getting around; but I had been in China for two years, which meant that none of these things were problems. I had a phone I had spent 450 U.S. dollars on so I wouldn’t have to wonder how the hell to get where I wanted to go; I had taken all the addresses and phone numbers with me so that I would never have to look for a hotel on this trip; I had studied Chinese for two years in China, so speaking wasn’t a problem; and, the best part of all, I had booked all my train tickets in advance through a Chinese travel agent called China Connection Tours.

When I had been planning the trip back home, I had been unsure of the importance of booking train tickets in advance. We would be staying in many destinations for four or five days, and I had to pay a 5 to 20 dollar surcharge for every ticket the agency booked for me, so it seemed like maybe it was planning overkill. This had been another great thing for me to stress out over while I was planning the trip. Was I planning too much? Was I locking us into an itinerary that we wouldn’t enjoy? Was I just a spaz who was doing way too much in advance and wasting money on train tickets that wouldn’t be used?

This is the same classroom from the other end -- viewing the front of the classroom, the place where I stood for 5 hours a week for two years, trying to help 50 people make some progress learning English.

Turns out, it was not a waste at all. Throughout our trip, I can’t remember running into a single other foreigner who didn’t have some horror story about something that had happened to him/her two or three days prior wherein he or she had to sit in a hard seat on a Chinese train for 12 to 30 hours. We met so many people who had done this. For some reason, this summer in China, the entire country had decided to go out traveling, and it was virtually impossible to get a sleeper train ticket anywere. The only things for sale were hard seats. We met people who had totally changed their travel plans in order to avoid nightmare rides like this, and then we met people who had done days on trains in hard seats. We met a few people who had even done overnight rides with standing-room-only tickets. They had literally stood on the train for whole nights, surrounded by rowdy Chinese tourists or regular folks heading out to dagong, hit work…in other words heading out of their hometowns to do some kind of manual or unskilled labor.

The worst case of travel unpreparedness I saw on our trip was a young guy we ran into in Sichuan. He was American, maybe 25, with long brown hair and a beard, dressed in earthy colors and dark green carpenter pants. I ran into him in the morning, when we were checking out of our hostel to head south to Yunnan. This poor guy was also checking out, but he was headed to Shanghai. He had booked a flight to the city without booking a hotel room, and for some reason (which I couldn’t fathom) he had waited until this moment, when he was about to leave for the airport, to try to resolve the issue.

He was freaking out. He couldn’t speak Chinese, so he had enlisted one of the poor front-desk girls at the hostel to help him get a hostel bed or a hotel room. But every call she was making was turning out to be a dead end. I stood at the counter behind him, waiting to check out, while he cursed in front of me.

The main street in the center of Sanming University.

“How could there be no fucking rooms left anywhere in that goddamn city?!” he asked (not at her, but himself – he was obviously not trying to be rude to the front-desk girl but his stress was getting the better of him).

“Sorry, they say they have no room,” the Chinese girl said patiently.

“Can you try that number—try that one you had before,” he said, leaning over the counter and pointing to something on her computer screen. She was helping him find hotels online. I wondered if this task—pseudo travel-agent—really counted as the responsibility of the girl at the front desk at the hostel, where beds were about 45 yuan, or $6.50, per night.

While I waited the girl called four different hotels or hostels (I wasn’t sure which she was calling) and came up with nothing. The guy was completely frozen.

“Shit,” he said. “I really have to get to the airport. I’m really late already. Fuck! How am I supposed to just go to Shanghai with no hotel? Fuck. I’m probably going to have to get some fucking expensive hotel and it’s going to be more than my plane ticket. I may as well just not go. Shit!”

He was talking to nobody, because the girl behind the counter clearly only understood that he was very upset (she undoubtedly understood the word “fuck”, also), but I wanted to interject because I had been in his shoes several times.

“Dude,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. Just go get on your plane. You’ll find something when you get there. When you arrive, just get in a cab and tell the driver ‘hotel’, and he’ll take you someplace fine.”

This didn’t really calm the dude that much, but perhaps it helped, because a couple of minutes later he pulled the move that sometimes you just have to pull when you’re traveling. He said “Fuck it,” grabbed his bag, and headed for the airport.

Remarkably, my cousin and I got to the curb before him and were working on hailing a cab when he arrived in the street. Even more remarkably, when we successfully hailed a cab and I offered it to him, he refused. “No, no, you guys were here first. You take it, it’s your cab,” he said.

Obviously this American had not been in China for long. I was astonished that he had even considered refusing an open car from someone who was offering it to him; any other Chinese in the entire country would have stolen the cab from me without even blinking if I had bent down to tie my shoes. If I actually offered a cab to a Chinese in a hurry, I am 100 percent certain that it would never be turned down.

Nonetheless, I told him to get in the cab and catch his flight. Which, after a slight hesitation (he looked like he was willing to accept whatever fate was going to throw at him at this point, including an inability to get to the airport in time), he did. Jess and I continued to try to get a cab for a few minutes, and got to the train station in plenty of time.

We basically always had plenty of time, even when I was stressed out about time. Maybe because I was often stressed out about time? I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Anyway, we didn’t miss any trains or planes the whole trip. We had only one small mishap on the trip, which was that Jess’s day-bag got stolen. Other than that, everything went fine. And I started to realize that everything was going to go fine as I walked along the street in Shanghai, headed to the subway so I could go to my hostel, already halfway to Beijing a full three days before my cousin would even arrive there.

I guess, my point is that I kind of overthink travel a bit when I’m sitting in my comfortable Fujian home, half-dreaming, half-worrying.

After arriving in Shanghai I found the hostel without any trouble. It’s called the Rock&Wood International Youth Hostel, a well-located and clean and modern hostel with decent prices for Shanghai (60 yuan, about $9.50 per night for bunks). The only strange thing about the hostel was that there were literally no Chinese staying there. This was the only time I had seen a youth hostel in China with no Chinese, and I never saw a native Chinese in the several nights I stayed there (this was also where Jess and I ended our trip). By the time my head hit the pillow that night I wasn’t worried about anything. In my first night in Shanghai I went shopping for some essentials that I hadn’t been able to buy in Fujian, and chatted with a couple of Australians who had traveled the world, skateboarding everywhere, and had come to Shanghai and discovered a Russian community of skaters in the city, just by going out and skating in the streets. They told me that Shanghai has the largest skate park in the world, and that they had gone there, and that they had seen less than a dozen people there all day. That most of the place was grown over with weeds. This was about as unsurprising to me as the fact that Shanghai had the largest skateboard park in the world was surprising. These two were the first skaters I had seen in China.

They also had impressions of China that were profoundly weird to me. Their impressions were roughly thus:

• Beers and going out clubbing are super cheap
• The Russian skaters throw great parties
• It’s, like, an international city, you know?

Anyway, they were cool guys. And by the time I met them I had had a few of the hostel’s 10 yuan beers. So eventually I commandeered the conversation and started telling them stories about what I had learned in Fujian, about the Chinese government, modern Chinese history. I told them about a student of mine whose mother had died because the family couldn’t afford the surgery needed for the form of cancer she had (I never learned, because of the language barrier—at the time I learned the story I couldn’t speak Chinese—what kind of cancer she had).

I talked more than I usually do, and I remember a distinct silence after the story about the cancer.

“Woah, man, that’s intense,” one of the Aussies said.

Then they went to bed. I realized that I would have to tone down my China obsession and try to assimilate a bit more back into the expat mindset if I was going to live in hostels for the next month, and if I was going to serve as any kind of enjoyable guide for my cousin. Hard truths about politics and daily life in China probably don’t go well with fun summer travel. Anyway, I felt like the skaters needed a dose of reality.

I, too, finished my beer, and went back to my room. The next day I had a flight to catch to Beijing.

Beijing

I had an expat buddy in Beijing. Two, actually, and I was planning to stay with them my first night in Beijing and then move to a hostel, so as not to put them out too much, and meet my cuz the day after next at the Beijing airport.

After arriving in Beijing I went straight to the subway to head to their place, and was immediately confronted with the most immediate and brutal fact of Beijing for anyone who has to ride the subway there: There are a lot of fucking people.

After taking the express rail from the airport into the city (about 30 minutes), I entered the actual subway. Folks were “lining up” at the entrances to the subway cars, and as the actual train arrived a subway employee, probably noting my large rolling suitcase, waved me to another line that she presumably thought would be les of a shoving match to enter through, and I ignored her. Ignoring Chinese people is, unfortunately, a kind of habit of mine, as I usually find public officials, waiters, and transport people to be kind of pushy and unhelpful and unconcerned with the people they’re actually supposed to be helping. If they want you to do something, it often has nothing to do with what is actually right for you—you’re standing someplace that you’re technically not allowed to stand, for instance, and even though there are 20 other Chinese standing there the official singles you out as the foreigner and asks you alone to move to a different spot, for “safety”. Something like that. But it turns out in this instance I should have listened, because when the train arrived it was completely packed, literally packed with people, and the only way I could get on was to basically use force. Which I did. Which resulted in a couple of yelps from people whose shins met the blunt edge of my suitcase. I felt bad, and apologized, but I didn’t even know whom I was apologizing to. The subway car consisted of a mass of bodies crushed in together, and it’s not like anybody was going to call me out on being rude. The rule in situations like this in China is: do what you have to do. In this case, that means that everybody was pushing, and it’s not like I was going to go against the grain here.

I made it to Natasha and Nick’s place (my expat friends, one British, one American) and dropped my stuff in their comfy, upscale apartment. Natasha had a knack for living in nice places in China. (The rent on this place, I later found out, was more than 60 percent of my monthly salary in Fujian.) Natasha and I chatted and caught up. She would be moving to Chicago soon to go to grad school, and Nick would be moving with her. This would definitely be our last chance to hang out for a long time, and we had met in China – she and I had moved here at the same time, and knew a mutual friend from back home who introduced us over Facebook. Our friendship was kind of a rare one for me: the chance to talk to someone from the same place, who had come to China for the same reasons, and yet experienced a very different China from me, was totally refreshing for me. Natasha had stories about “real” expat life in China—meeting foreigners who had married Chinese, who had lived here for years, who were married to other foreigners themselves, who had long-term careers here. I had basically spent the last two years in the presence of Chinese, and that was it. The world of foreigners in China was foreign to me. And it was always comforting to hear that I wasn’t the only one.

In the evening we went out for dinner and trivia night at an Irish pub. This was weird for two reasons: first, the Western food was good; second, the Italian restaurant we had dinner at happened to be hosting a symposium for foreigners in Beijing involved in the energy industry. And it was packed with about 50 other foreigners. And there was a keynote speakers whose topic was solid waste disposal. The host of the symposium introduced her by explaining, with a little embarrassment, that solid waste did not mean what we might think it meant. It meant, like, cans and bottles and paper and stuff like that. Not, you know, that solid waste. So the four of us sat through our dinners of pasta and pizza, unable to really talk at any length because of the talk that was going on, listening to fascinating details about how garbage is dealt with in China. Also, the power went out. And there was a leak in the ceiling that was pretty distracting.

We did trivia later, and the other foreigners were weird. This is another inevitable thing about China, and a reason I’m usually not unhappy that I chose to go to a city with almost no foreigners in it. The foreigners in China, in general, tend to be at least slightly weirder than the people who actually inhabit English-speaking countries. No one seems to know why this is. There’s a general theory that it’s because life in China is easy, so it tends to attract people who couldn’t handle a more challenging existence back home. Of course, that’s a half-baked theory. The truth is that China contains a lot of lame foreigners, and, naturally, a good percentage of really amazing people. Nick and Natasha were examples of the really amazing contingent. But they did mention that it could be hard to find decent foreigner friends in Beijing.

One of the women we did trivia night with, in particular, showed her stripes when she said some pretty tactless things to Natasha, one of which went something like, “Oh, you were thinking, Natasha? That’s new.” (Prompted by Natasha saying she was thinking about something. Aside from the fact that this joke is not funny, it makes no sense, because Natasha is one of the smartest women I’ve met. And that lady was definitely not.)

Lu Xun, looking like a player in his Cosby sweater, I must say.

That evening I slept on the air mattress they so graciously provided me, and then moved on to my hostel, where I would spend another night. The next morning I would go to meet Jess at the airport. I spent a while getting oriented, and then went to the Beijing Lu Xun museum, which was right near the place we stayed (Bejing Templeside Guest House, an amazing place located in a Beijing hutong, which sadly will be closed at the end of this season because the owner wants to renovate the property, so I won’t write much more about it here except to say that Emma, the young girl who manages the place, is a wonderful and helpful lady and that I hope she finds a great job after the hostel closes). Lu Xun is pretty much The Big Guy in Chinese literature, and it was interesting to see photos of the places he used to live and to read quotes from some of his books, and get a general feel for his life story (he was obviously brilliant). But, because most of the displays in the museum were 100 percent Chinese, I can’t say much more than that. I could get the general drift of the meaning of the displays, but can’t say that I absorbed a lot about Lu Xun from the museum, due to the lack of English (which is fair; I can’t see a lot of foreigners spending time in the museum).

I will say that I found one quote, centrally displayed over a black-and-white background of pretty austere looking grass in a field, pretty wonderful:

The Lu Xun quote in his museum.

“什么是路？就是从没路的地方践踏出来的，从只有荆棘的地方开辟出来的。”

“What is a road? It’s something that was trampled underfoot in a place where there was no road. It’s something that—in a place where before there were only thistles and thorns—was started.”

I didn’t do much else that first day. I found some really good street food vendors, and pigged out on lamb’s meat sandwiches in the hot Beijing summer sun. But that was about it. I was fully intent on relaxing, and I was very glad that the anxiety I had felt in Sanming had pretty much stayed there with all my crap when I left. I still had small worries, especially because Jess hadn’t really arrived yet, but I was happy, and felt the refreshed, renewed feeling you really only get when you travel. In the evening I chatted with the girls who ran the hostel and drank beers and read, and went to bed early so I’d be ready to pick up Jess in the morning.

Next post: Cuz arrives in Beijing and the trip begins in earnest.

Before nodding off, I happened to check the New York Times site to find that the artist Ai Weiwei had been released by Chinese authorities early this morn or late last night.

Having not spoken to any Chinese about this news, I have nothing original to say except that it seems like very good news in terms of free speech on Earth, I think the best I’ve seen in months.

The AP photo showing AWW shortly after he was released. Notice the two foreigners in the background. This could be one instance where foreign news coverage actually did some good in China.

My original inclination was to say that this seems like the best news related to China that I’ve seen in a long time, but that seems a little too broad. I think of the fact that last summer China surpassed Japan to become the second largest economy in the world; or that Chinese officials appear to be acknowledging that there are some problems with the Three Gorges Dam project; or that the Chinese government was meeting with Libya’s opposition leader in Beijing.

So those are all debatably better pieces of news for China, depending on your perspective. I.e., if you are an investor or a Chinese businessperson, you are probably happy that China’s economy is doing fairly well. If you are an environmentalist or live in southern China, you might be happy that the Chinese government is beginning to see the light about their ill-conceived and megalomaniacal Three Gorges Dam (i.e. if you live in southern China, you might be happy to see that the government has the capacity to show a glimmer of insight about environmental hazards associated with overly ambitions attempts to control nature). If you happen to believe that there is some legitimacy to England, France and America’s attempt to remove Muammar Gaddafi from power, and do not believe the conflict is simply a conspiracy among Western powers to sequester oil (as most Chinese seem to think it is), perhaps you will be pleased, if also perplexed, to know that the Chinese were meeting with the rebel leader.

But Ai Weiwei is a different matter. Ai was detained about three months ago, and has hardly been heard from since. I will leave it to you to check out the news about this artist-”dissident”, who has been an (perhaps the most) “outspoken critic” of the Chinese government for a long time. The only thing I can say about the release of Ai Weiwei is that, from everything I have seen and read of how dissidents are treated in this country, the Chinese government would not have released him unless they felt a great deal of pressure to do so, and that pressure, I believe, would have had to come from within Chinese borders.

I wrote a little bit (it’s embarrassing how little I write here about real-consequential political matters, but so it is) about Ai Weiwei’s protest of the demolition of his Shanghai studio on this blog. A friend of mine invited me to go to Shanghai last summer to attend the “protest”, which was really more like a big party in which thousands of Ai Weiwei fans were signing up to go eat river crab in Shanghai. At the time, I was busy and couldn’t go, but it was for the best because Ai Weiwei was put under house arrest and couldn’t attend, and I’m not even sure if the party really happened.

My friend gave me one of the seeds from Ai’s exhibit (or a replica thereof) at the Tate Modern Gallery in London, a souvenir he received for being a follower of Ai. That was as close as either of us got to whatever the protest would have been, had it been allowed to occur.

Now Ai has been released, and the New York Times story suggests that he may have been released under some agreement with the government that would limit his actions. But he has been released, in one piece, and he is talking to the foreign press, and he is still there.

That seems worth celebrating in itself. Chinageeks.org posted a startling list a few months back of the China dissidents who had either been detained or were missing in March. The list is long, and I’m unclear on how comprehensive it is / was, but anyway, just looking at the post gives you a sense of the lack of restraint the Chinese government has when it comes to silencing disagreeable parties.

So it’s cause for celebration that Ai Weiwei had been released. I believe that when you consider peoples’ basic motivations — i.e., the desire of individuals to build and maintain power — politics can become very simple. At its most basic, the decision to release Ai Weiwei might be seen as a concession to the belief of a public, one that remains inscrutable to most of us foreigners, that he should be free. Or at least I hope that’s the case, as the alternative would be that his arrest was meant as a threat to him and others like him that he should keep quiet.

But Ai Weiwei, at this point, seems a bit beyond the fold in my eyes. He had certainly been warned before, and had become too great a target to be used to set an example. It seems to me, and maybe this is more of a hope than a realistic interpretation of events, that perhaps after they caught him they realized they had nabbed too big a fish, and had to let him go. Anyway, he has been let go. Here’s hoping he’s still got gills.

It’s no secret that foreigners get stared at in China. Especially if you have very white or black skin, are especially tall or have non-black hair. You will get stared at a lot. You will have to become comfortable with your appearance, and if you’re not, you’ll have to change it. I’ve done a bit of both in the past two years — changing and getting comfortable with being looked at, and while there are times when it gets overwhelming and I just want to not be noticed by anyone for one minute, just to see what it would be like again, for the most part, I’m OK with it.

There’s another interesting aspect to it, though, aside from my own comfort level with being stared at. That is that other people in my company sometimes get weirded out by the sudden attention they’re getting from all directions.

For example, two weekends ago I was having lunch with a couple of my students. I teach a handful of high school students on Sundays, and usually we have lunch together after class in the food court in the mall downtown. Last weekend we happened to sit next to a whole family, like three generations sitting together, who had come to the clean and modern food court to have their lunch. Naturally, the two old ladies in the family, upon finding themselves seated next to me, could not stop talking about me, my skin, the way I ate, the way I spoke Chinese, the way other foreigners they had seen on the street or on television looked and spoke and ate and etc.

Note that they weren’t talking to me but about me, while sitting to my immediate right. It should have been clear to them that I understood everything they were saying, because I was talking with my students in Chinese. But this fact, that I probably understood, had no affect on them.

It drove my students nuts, however. They couldn’t focus on the conversation at all, and repeatedly went blank-faced when I asked them questions. I didn’t realize that it was because of the conversation going on to my right until the family got up and left and all the students gave sighs of relief, and one of them said, in English, “Finally they go!”

This is not new, however. Early on I learned that my Chinese friend Mike hated walking down the street with me, because all the staring eyes freaked him out. He would often walk behind me until I told him that if he didn’t stop pretended not to know me I was going to ditch him. The people it doesn’t seem to freak out is very pretty women. I was once walking with a very attractive female friend and asked her if all the people staring at us bothered her. “People stare at me all the time,” she said.

I did notice one other thing recently: When I’m walking down a crowded street, the people in front of me (i.e. the ones I’m walking behind) will often turn around to see what is behind them because so many people are staring at the space behind them that they know something is there, they just don’t know what. This is often creepy for me to witness, because it’s like they have eyes in the back of their heads and just intuitively know that a laowai is there. It took me awhile to notice that phenomenon, and now that I have I kind of get a kick out of it.

Which brings me to my last, and funniest thing about being such a spectacle for being white: I learned last year that if I go to McDonald’s and sit on the bench and put my arm around the statue of Ronald McDonald and sit perfectly still, people have no idea if I’m real or not and so slow way down and stare at me until I crack up. Which takes about .005 seconds. I guess it’s immature but it’s probably also the most fun thing I have ever done.

Since it basically feels like summer again, and warm and sunny and nice, I have started jogging again over the past month.

Unfortunately, however, the track and soccer field in the middle of town has been torn down for a new housing development, leaving no public space for working out in the entire city, and no soccer field except two that are inaccessible to the public because they’re at schools.

There have been upset people in town and annoyed people, and there appears even to have been a store that protestied the demolition of the arena by refusing to move their stuff out of the store (their store is built into part of the stadium walls, so they’ve got to go). But mostly people have just dealt with it and started doing ridiculous things, like running in circles in the big apartment park that I live in, or braving the walkway by the river, which constantly has motorcycles zipping along it (even though it’s for pedestrians). I’m in the latter category.

Yesterday when I was coming home from my run it was a beautiful, hot, sunny afternoon. After a few days of rain, people seemed to be celebrating by doing laundry. The faces of the buildings were collages of pinks and greens and blues, sheets and shirts hung out to dry.

Apparently the small scuzzy restaurant on the corner nearest my building had decided to air out their kitchen, too, because as I was walking home I heard a crash from inside the doors, and out came two rats, squeaking madly, with a couple short young cooks in white, but grimy, chef’s coats in pursuit. A girl came out after them, smiling happily at the entertainment. Another rat came running out. I noted that their refrigerator unit appeared to have been pulled away from the wall.

The rats appeared stunned by the sudden sunlight. They ran towards the street, and then ran back towards the shop, but the cooks were chasing them around, and there was nowhere to go but the street or the restaurant. This went on for about 40 seconds, I’d say.

The two Chinese guys were wearing the blue flip-floppy things that I wear in the shower and occasionally when I’m hanging out at home, and that you sometimes see on poor guys from the villages who have come to town to beg, on old ladies out for evening walks, or on extremely casual cooks with questionable personal hygiene. My suspicions of their poor hygiene were confirmed when the shorter guy, with long orange hair reminiscent of a hedgehog, managed to stomp on the head of one of the rats, leaving a smear of blood on the step of the restaurant.

It was a good hit. Even though he was wearing soft rubber flip flops, I got the impression that he had hit some kind of nerve or perhaps given the rat a concussion. It sort of flopped around helplessly for a sec before the other short guy in the grimy white smock gave it a good stomper, crushing it with much more authority, which was easier, now that it was immobile. A little more blood sort of splattered out, and one of the cooks sort of kicked it onto the sidewalk. No time to dally; there were two other rats to deal with. This is all while they’re wearing these flimsy little fucking flip-flops, mind you, which if you were going to ask me to stomp a rat to death I’m not even sure I would do it in combat boots, for fear some globule of rat gore would fly up and hit me in the eye, or something.

The next rat had been pretty much cornered next to the entrance to the restaurant, but it was evading death by flip-flop by virtue of a motorcycle and a few crates of garbage that it was running behind. There was a crack in the wall that would have been amply big enough for the rat to run into and perhaps even re-enter the restaurant, but for some reason it didn’t seem to see the escape route and instead just kept running back and forth madly, trying to escape the blows that rained down around it. The cook had now picked up a crude wooden stool and was attempting to smash the rat with the seating area, and eventually succeeded, crushing some part of the rat’s hindquarters, thereby stunning it, thereby allowing the death blow to be dealt with said crude wooden stool with relative ease by the cook in the grimy whitish-gray smock with the hedgehog hair and the blue rubber flip-flops and the questionable personal hygiene.

Which left rat three. I should note that at no time during this ordeal has any of the onlookers, besides perhaps me, reacted to this scene with anything other than complete absorption and apparent delight. The two stocky young pasty-faced cooks are laughing and grinning and moving about with great enthusiasm, and the very pretty young girl who works as a waitress and is wearing a one-piece blue-and-white uniform advertising some kind of Chinese beer on the apron, and a couple of other onlookers, have seemed pretty much totally happy to be witness to this brutal rat massacre, and I have to admit that even though I find rats repulsive, and in this case I was especially repulsed because I had on many occasions enjoyed the fish and snail dishes at this rather overpriced “cheap restaurant” (so the window claims), I too enjoyed the show, and couldn’t help smiling every time the rat again evaded the pudgy little cook guy. There was something really funny, and gross, about the little rat managing to escape him because of a pile of trash and a motorcycle. But the others seemed to more think just funny.

The glee of the audience is important here because at this point a motorcycle driver, who had just been parked on this corner waiting for fares, decided that he wanted to have a go, and joined the fray. This proved the rat’s undoing, because with the pudgy hedgehog-haired cook guy on the outside of the garbage and the motorcycle cabbie wearing a white helmet on the inside, they were able to do a pincer motion, thereby, through pure strategy and superior cognitive ability, eliminate the rat’s chances of escape.

It was the moto-cabbie who did it. He sort of poked at the rat with his toe, leaning his body back and stretching his foot forward in a jabbing motion because he couldn’t quite reach past the trash and the motorcycle with his full flat foot, and something about that quick sharp poke totally wrecked the rat’s game, and that was it, it was stunned, and the moto-cabbie sort of dragged the rat out by clamping down on its rear end with his toe and clawing backward with his sneaker, the way you might try to trap a dropped roll of toilet paper with your foot if you didn’t want or couldn’t get up from the toilet seat, and then he, and it wasn’t so gross to me, somehow to see a person actually wearing shoes to do this, stomped the rat sharply, obviously killing it.

Everybody seemed pretty proud and celebratory, and I did notice one woman who had stopped to watch the hunt immediately continue on her walk after the death of the third rat, looking somewhat perplexed and troubled, and I too decided to move on, sort of trying to forget about it but also feeling that this kind of made me less afraid of rats, in a way, and more confident that the next time I encounter a rat in my home (if there’s a next time) I’ll know how to kill it, as in the past I’ve always been afraid to try the stomping method with rats, out of a fear, mostly, that blood would splatter everywhere the way it does when you stomp a fat and juicy bug.

I’ve also been thinking about studying Buddhism lately and thinking a bit more about what it has to say about treatment of life forms and thinking more critically about my consumption of animals and how I still have no way to really justify it that is in any way ethical, but I’m not all the way there yet.

I also decided promptly after witnessing the rat killing never to eat at that overpriced restaurant ever again. And also not to talk to those pudgy little hedgehog cooks any more. I always thought they smiled a little psychotically whenever I went into their restaurant, and the service was terrible.

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In a completely unrelated note, I have learned how to play a Taylor Swift song on the guitar and how to sing it, after one of my students shared his almost total obsession with the American country-pop singer a couple weeks ago. (Many students have told me they really like her songs and I try to teach stuff they like, and they like nothing more than learning songs.) This is, needless to say, a serious blow to my sense of manhood and my trust in my own musical taste, but even worse is the fact that after I learned the song I actually kind of liked it, which is very confusing for me.

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I also recently learned that the reason so many old Chinese men have hideously long hairs growing out of moles on their faces is because Chinese medicine teaches (supposedly) that plucking or removing those hairs can make the mole cancerous. I had previously, and erroneously, it turns out, been told (by a foreigner — the recent correction came from a Chinese) that it was because they thought those disgusting long hairs were good luck. This is typical: it’s amazing how many things I’ve had to re-learn multiple times about Chinese and Chinese culture, because of poor translations, miscommunications, or just bad information. It’s funny, because if I had stayed here for just like three months and then gone home I could have talked like nonstop about China and it probably would have all been garbage. It’s entirely possible that that’s still the case, although I hope not.

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All for today. End of trans.