Having Fun All The Time

My mother took this picture, and I think it is the best one from the whole trip. The "BJ" stands for Beijing, of course. I have no idea why these people look so serious.

Beijing: An unwelcome welcome, the storied wall and a big goodbye

Immediately upon arriving in Beijing, we got in a car accident. It was around eight in the morning and we had rented two cabs at the train station to take us to our hotel; I called the hotel and asked them if it was all right if we came and checked in early, and they said yes. I had booked us in a small hotel called the “Templeside Guest House”; which actually turned out to be a tiny hostel in one of Beijing’s thousands of tiny residential alleyways known as Hutongs.

The hutong where our hostel was located. A bit misleading, but the inside was nice.

The Hutongs in Beijing are a relatively famous attraction of the city; many of them are hundreds of years old and are packed with tiny apartments and convenience stores; really like little towns to themselves tucked away from the chaos of Beijing traffic. Really, I have seen these kinds of alleyway systems in Xiamen, too; they seem to exist in any city that is reasonably old and interesting. But Beijing has a lot of them, and I was interested in the Templeside hotel because it was located in a 600-year-old Beijing hutong (supposedly 600 years old).

Regardless of the age, it turned out that the hotel was definitely located in an obscure hutong, and so true in fact that when we arrived at the hutong, it really looked from the outside like nothing more than an alleyway, and it was hard to believe that we were supposed to go in there to find our hotel. On top of that, our cabs had stopped on the opposite side of the street and expected me and my family to unload our luggage and walk across four lanes of Beijing rush hour traffic to get there. So I told them we couldn’t stop there and to take us to the other side of the street. Which they dutifully did, and which went fine, until I heard a loud crash and the cab in front of mine – the one that held my mom, uncle and cousin – was hit in the passenger-side door by a bus.

We were trying to keep track of what day it was by counting on our fingers when we took photos. But after day 10 it didn't make sense anymore.

It was a low-speed collision and luckily everyone was fine (except for the cab’s door and front right fender, and probably the driver’s day, which were all ruined), but it was the first car accident I had been even incidentally involved in in China (aside from my drunken shouting at the road rage incident in Shanghai); and right after the accident a girl from the Templeside hostel came running out of the hutong shouting “Oh my god!” in unison with me, except I was adding more English expletives. Everything was OK, though; we grabbed our things from the cabs, my mom actually paid the driver who was now engaged in a heated argument with the bus driver, and we followed Emma, the young Chinese girl from the hostel, into the hutong to go to our new Beijing home.

I’ll spare words on the Templeside hostel except to say that it was awesome. I think it shocked my family at first to see that I had booked them in a hostel (even though it was an honest mistake on my part), but we all had our own rooms and bathrooms and the place had a great courtyard with a garden in the center, and we met more interesting people just lounging around in the courtyard than we did during all the rest of our trip in China. Which is how it always works with hostels. On top of that, the service was excellent and everything was a fraction the cost of what it would have been at more mainstream, more plush and probably physically more comfortable hotel. We got essentially free tour guide service from the four girls who ran the hostel, we got travel tips from other people at the hostel, and after three and half days of stay and a lot of meals eaten at the hostel our bill for three rooms was only around $500 USD (including two dozen beers, three breakfasts for the group of five, one dinner and a lot of coffees).

This is the base of the Mutianyu area where we took the tram to the top of the wall. The base was completely flooded with bloodthirsty vendors, but once we got to the wall it was mercifully quiet and surprisingly pretty empty of other people.

Beijing was hot from day one. After settling in the hostel that morning we went out and checked out the Forbidden City, which was beautiful but incredibly hot and crowded and in some sense just a dizzyingly large and rather beautiful place with a more-or-less boring history, at least as far as the history the tour guides know goes. It’s a lot of hooh hah about how many concubines the emperors of China had and where the concubines lived and where the emperor lived and you get little substantial stuff about the political significance of the place and the way the country was governed. Not that I know much about those things in relation to the Forbidden City anyway, but it would have been nice to learn more. Instead I learned stuff I already knew: the City is old, it’s big, the emperor lived there, he had sex with lots of women, the place was inhabited by eunuchs, it was forbidden to any guests for hundreds of years, etc. That’s about all there was to the story. We got a guide for 150 RMB because I was too hot to seriously barter, but I think it should have been 100 or less. Then, late in the afternoon, when we had all pretty much reached our limits of sweatiness and crankiness, my uncle and cousin disappeared into the crowd somehow, and I stood with my parents for 10 minutes scanning faces in the crowd before we decided to just give up and go back to the hotel, which we did.

The two things the Forbidden City has going for it are that it is huge, and that it is symmetrical. There's a lot of history, but on the scorching hot day when we went, I just felt like getting out of there. I had had all the scorching hot hugeness and symmetry that I could take.

When we got to the hotel we immediately started drinking, and this didn’t stop until about 6 hours later after we had finished an enormous Brazillian steakhouse meal in Beijing and returned to the hotel, and I realized that I was completely exhausted, drunk, and had pretty much been completely sapped of optimism and energy. We had really not stopped moving for over 40 hours, since the night previous we had slept on the train, and everybody seemed to be on everybody else’s nerves in the group after a difficult day. Eventually I slept, but it wasn’t restful, and I realized I was beginning to get worn out from the constant motion – it had been over a month since I had really had any time to relax and do nothing, which is a long time of constant activity for me.

A quick group shot on basically the final destination of our epic tour, the idiosyncratic, at time successful and at times useless Great Wall of China.

The next day was better, because we went to the Great Wall. As I learned from Peter Hessler’s book, Country Driving, the Great Wall is actually not one wall but many, many different walls that sort of amble along northern China, from Beijing to Mongolia. But anyway the wall we went to was definitely the Great Wall – the one you see in pictures that is big and stone and stretches on to both horizons. We went to Mutianyu Great Wall by way of a rented taxi van driver whose number my uncle had got from the woman who cuts his hair in San Francisco.

The mighty explorers

It took us about two hours to get there, the taxi for the whole day was 600 RMB (the driver, Mr. Li, couldn’t really speak English, or just barely, so it was pretty much all Chinese with him), and Mutianyu was ridiculously beautiful and the tourists were beautifully few. We walked along the wall for a couple of hours, looking at the rocky peaks in the distance and the endless rope-like coil along the ridge’s edge, and fell into the spell. It was a lot like seeing the Grand Canyon – description doesn’t really prepare you for it, photos can’t really ruin it for you; you just have to go there, and when you see it you’ll definitely feel something.

Mutianyu Great Wall. Note the lovely relative lack of people

After the Great Wall we went to the Summer Palace, which was another loud hot crowded tourist attraction and beautiful, but I think we were all too hot and had lost the patience for it. We walked around a bit and then went home.

The Summer Palace. A ton of buildings and gates. Very pretty, but beyond that I didn't get it. We did see an old lady take an astonishing nose-dive into the side of a hawker's stand, though (sorry, no picture of that)

In the evening we ordered in and ate dinner at the tables in the hostel garden and watched World Cup soccer, and for me that was my favorite night of the whole trip – relaxing with other hostel people and chatting and eating in the garden, like an actual relaxing vacation and not a maddened race across China. We didn’t have enough nights like that over the trip but that was because there was so much to fit in – and that’s just how the trip had to be. There are so many things to see and do in China, it’s such a huge place. It’s got as much to see and do and experience as the U.S., maybe – it’s not like a smaller European country where you can get a feel for it in a week or so. It is a big, big, mother of a beast of a country that takes serious travel and serious patience and a serious willingness to push your boundaries. And I began to realize that the trip was almost over and we had done all those things and we had actually managed to see a huge swath of the country, and that we had made it to Beijing, pretty much to the end.

That day was my father’s birthday, July 5, and I borrowed one of the hostel’s bikes and went out in search of a place to get him a cake. I cruised up the road outside our hutong for about 10 minutes and found a bakery and ordered a cake for 75 yuan, and a half hour later I picked it up. I hadn’t had time to do more than that for his birthday, but I was happy that he was in China. It was definitely one of those things that you could never predict in life – a year ago, I would have never imagined that I would celebrate my dad’s birthday on the Great Wall of China. But that’s how it happened.

Tiananmen Sqare. I didn't even notice the cluster of umbrellas -- gotta credit my mom with a good eye for a good photo

The next day was our last day. Together, we went to Tiananmen Square and stood in the middle of it, and I had to ask a Chinese person if we were in Tiananmen Square to confirm that we were actually there. It basically looks like a giant, giant parking lot where no cars are allowed. It’s a bit more impressive than that, but that’s the gist of it. Then I went shopping with my mom, in the evening we went to a totally amazing acrobat show (which was also slightly disturbing to me because the performers appeared to have been performing the stunts since the age of 3, and I have seen street acrobat performers, children, performing in China and they can be a pretty depressing sight – often extremely poor, performing stunts that have twisted their bodies in unnatural ways, 5 year old children working all day doing stunts to try to feed their families, etc.), we ate Beijing roast duck for dinner, and then we all went to bed. I would get up in the morning at 3:45 to accompany my parents to the airport.

I got up in the morning and we found a cab right away outside the hutong even though it was 4 a.m. and pitch dark. The ride to the airport was 100 RMB and took about a half hour, and we made it on time. I was extremely anxious, really unaccountably so, and just figured I was feeling that way because I still had to bring my uncle and cousin to the airport and then later I would also be flying back to Fujian late in the evening. I also hadn’t yet found a hotel for when I landed in Fuzhou. But really it was because I was saying goodbye. I had gotten used to having my family with me, and what I had known would happen was happening – I had become happy and comfortable to be with them and then we were all shoving off again and going our separate ways, and it felt a little bit like falling back into a vacuum. Due to so many factors – language barriers, cultural differences, my newness to the place, economic differences, personality differences – there is still really no one in my city who I feel close to, who I really deep down trust and feel trusted by. Which is also how I felt a lot of the time in Oregon after college. So saying goodbye to people who I hold dear initially wasn’t easy, and I knew it would take a while again to adjust back to my normal life.

This is just a photo of a poster of the acrobat performance, because we couldn't take photos in the show, but they did this trick at the end of the show. 14 girls together mounted a moving bicycle. It was crazy and the girl driving the bike was wearing a weight-lifting belt

But later that evening, around 10 p.m., I too was taking off from Beijing and headed south again. When I finally arrived in Fuzhou I encountered some very nice people who, at 3 in the morning, helped me find a hotel near the bus station for the night (as I expected might happen – Chinese people in strange cities, I find, are always totally willing to help a strange foreigner in need, maybe partly to practice their English but really just because of basic kindness); and in the evening on the eighth my bus arrived back in Sanming, the old familiar and yet unfamiliar place that I still call home. I was tired and had developed my second cold since the trip started, but I was back. I saw a familiar face soon after arriving, which helped soothe me, and then I went home and slept, and the journey was really, definitely over.

In the airport, waiting for my flight back South. I made the mistake of spending most of the last day in Beijing in the airport, waiting for my flight and writing this epic summary of our epic tour, after which point I pretty much passed out of exhaustion in the airport for the afternoon. Thus the genesis of this 10,000 word summary. Thanks for reading

The family arrives in Hong Kong

(This is part 1 of a 5-part series)

Hong Kong: A delay, a rainstorm and a night ride through the mountains

The journey all across eastern China has just ended, so before posting pictures I’m going to try to recall everything I can about the 14 day trip here.

Leaving Sanming

My family’s visit to China took place at the beginning of summer, just a day after I wrapped up the last bits of my teaching work for the semester. My mother and father would be flying to Hong Kong from Boston, and my uncle and cousin (mother’s side) both flew in from San Francisco. I was pretty much flat-out busy for two weeks before they came, booking tickets and hotels at the last minute and administering final exams and giving grades. So when the time finally came to take a train to Hong Kong to meet my parents, I was exhausted and had developed a bit of a cold, but I was ready to go. I had been living in a small city in southeastern China (Sanming, Fujian Province, right across from Taiwan) for several months without leaving for more than a couple of days, and I hadn’t left Fujian since February, so I was ready to get out of the area for a little while and see what the rest of China had to offer.

Hong Kong

The first destination was Hong Kong. I left Sanming on the 23rd of June to go meet my parents, submitting final grades that morning and then buying a sleeper bus ticket to take me the 14 hours to Shenzhen, which is a major industrial city in the Chinese mainland just a few miles away from Hong Kong Island. From Shenzhen I could literally cross the border from mainland to Hong Kong by subway. I had originally planned to go by sleeper train, which is much more comfortable and in this case faster, but all across southeastern China over the past month it had rained, and floods and landslides had shut down the train route. So I boarded the bus in the afternoon and we set out west.

The only notable thing from the bus trip was that the bus’s dinner stop was several hours away from Sanming, at a broken-down-looking roadside restaurant where they served bad chicken soup and fried vegetables and rice and charged an outrageous 15 yuan for the meal (about $2 USD; normally this kind of meal would cost 7 or 8 yuan). But the place was obviously in the middle of nowhere and supported at least a few families, who appeared to be living in total poverty. Connected to the dining hall I could see their living quarters, which consisted basically of half a dozen beds crowded together and shrouded in mosquito nets. The place is hard to describe; it was just the kind of place that you know at a glance is inhabited by people who make no money and have very little, so it was easier not to feel cheated as I forked over my money. It was a bit of a racket; I took my food and they told me to pay later, and after I started eating they asked for the money; that was how I got tricked. But there was nothing to do about it; I had already started eating so I couldn’t barter. I paid my money and reboarded the bus.

As the sun was coming up I arrived in Shenzhen. Shenzhen is a huge manufacturing city that is full of modern, brand-new buildings, and it would look like a modern, well-developed city except that everything in it appears to be under construction, recently under construction or about to go under construction. There are piles of dirt, brick, metal, and other building materials everywhere — in parking lots, on sidewalks, in roads — and everything gives a feeling of being sort of haphazardly placed — as though the entire city were a sort of giant sandbox or playpen for designers and builders toying with the idea of a city. Buildings seem to not really line up in neat blocks; parking lots are incomplete; restaurants sit awkwardly next to factories and warehouses crop up next to shopping malls. The whole place seemed surreal as the bus drove through it, periodically stopping to drop off passengers, one at a time, until the bus was almost empty when we finally arrived at the station.

When I walked out of the Shenzhen station there were about 20 cabbies surrounding the exit, trying to usher me to their cabs. I didn’t think quickly and let one of the cabbies take me to his cab before I started to barter with him for a ride to the Shenzhen train station; I should have haggled cab fares when I was surrounded by 20 cabbies, but wasn’t sharp enough in the dazed blue dawn. So the 20 minute ride cost me more than it should have; about 70 yuan. The city started to redden as the sun came up and my cab approached the train station. After about 20 minutes we arrived at the main Shenzhen rail station and the cabbie told me that the subway would open in about 30 minutes, at 6:30 a.m.

As I was nearly arriving at the Hong Kong border crossing, where my cell phone would stop working (for some reason mainland China cell phones don’t work in Hong Kong), my mom called me up and told me that their plane had been delayed for reasons unknown, and that they would arrived at least 12 hours late; they were stuck in their connecting city, Detroit. This was fine because we had 36 hours in Hong Kong before we would fly to Guilin, to begin our travel in mainland, but it was a bit of a downer. She also told me that immediately before leaving San Francisco, my uncle had had to take his daughter (who was also coming to China) to the hospital because she had been complaining of strange stomach cramps, but that the hospital had cleared her to fly and they had successfully taken off. So I should still go to HK to connect with them. I wished my mom luck and said that I would try to find a calling card in HK so that I could get in touch with her and confirm her new arrival time later.

Arriving again

Arriving in Hong Kong was less dramatic than it was the first time I traveled from mainland China to HK, probably because this time I knew what to expect. I knew that I would suddenly find myself in a much wealthier, cleaner, more orderly, more familiar in a way and yet also unfamiliar environment. I knew that I would suddenly become more aware of my own body odor and clothing and that everyone would suddenly be better dressed and wealthier and just generally moving at a different pace (faster pace) than I had become accustomed to. So it wasn’t that much of a shock, and it felt really good to be back on the streets of Hong Kong (I spent 10 days there in the spring waiting for a new visa), cruising around on their super clean and efficient subway system and walking down the streets, digging the Western city vibe.

I only had the morning and part of the afternoon to get organized before I had to go to the airport to meet my uncle and cousin, so I immediately found an internet bar to search for the address of our hotel so I could check in and figure out how to get a calling card.

I settled on a calling card in one of the 711s that are all over Hong Kong (this is one of the major differences between HK and mainland; mainland really hasn’t figured out the magic of convenience stores, and it really does make life less convenient) and figured out how to check into our hotel, which was the plush and comfortable City Garden Hotel a few subway stops east of Central HK. I took a shower in the hotel’s bathroom and sat in the hotel room for 10 minutes and suddenly felt cleaner than I had felt in months. There is just something about being in HK that is that way — it’s the subtle noxious smell of mainland hotel bathrooms, or the dirty smell of the water, or the fact that laundry drying machines are not allowed in southern mainland — there is some indefinable way that life in mainland is dirtier than life elsewhere, inevitably dirtier, and once you are accustomed to it you don’t really feel it or sense it again until you leave mainland completely. And that is what I did in the hotel — just sat there and felt cleaner and fresher than I had felt in a long time, and then put on a fresh shirt and headed off to the airport.

Visiting the Night Market. It was so hot and sweaty and crowded, and we were exhausted, so we ducked out quickly after arriving

At the airport I met up with my cousin and uncle and then we headed back to the hotel pretty much immediately, and after about 20 minutes of walking around we ate at the best restaurant I have tried in Hong Kong yet: called Little Chili. It was a small Sichuan-style restaurant only a few blocks away from the City Garden Hotel specializing in (as the name implies) spicy Sichuan dishes including hot pot, shui3 zhu3 (I don’t know what that dish is called in English) and spicy fried meat dishes. We ordered Sichuan-style spicy fried chicken, fried Chinese greens, fried Chinese boiled dumplings and an eggplant dish and everything was ridiculously good, and way cheaper than you’d expect in Hong Kong. The 20-oz Qingdao beers were only 10 HKD! In the 10 days I spent in Hong Kong in the spring, I scoured the island for good food deals and I never found anything like this place. If you’re looking for good, cheap food in Hong Kong, Little Chili is definitely the place to go.

Unfortunately I screwed up ordering food and mistakenly ordered two orders of the spicy chicken dish, even just one of which would have been too big for the three of us. This was because I pretended to understand the waitress when I really didn’t understand the last question she asked me. After the confusion and the slight botching of what otherwise would have been an excellent introduction for my cousin and uncle to Chinese cuisine, I realized I would have to be stubborn and persistent in getting Chinese speakers to help me understand them through the duration of the trip, which would eventually result in me really getting much better at sticking to a conversation in Chinese, even when things got bungled or were difficult to understand. Which is of course essential for really making progress in the language.

The next morning, my parents came. It had been about nine months since I had seen them, which is one of the longest if not the longest period I’ve gone without seeing them. It was really joyful and almost tearful. In a way, I was almost nervous to see them again because it had been so long and I had missed them — I was nervous about the emotional ups and downs of seeing them for a good period of time and then having to say goodbye again. But seeing them again in person overwhelmed those worries and after a few minutes we got headed on our way to getting a taxi back to the hotel.

Connecting away from home

The next day, in Hong Kong, it rained, and it continued to rain throughout most of our time in the South. Our one day in Hong Kong we spent walking around — we went to the Man Mo Temple, and shopped for the necessities we would need for the rest of our trip, and did some antique-shop browsing. My cousin and uncle went to the old nunnery in Hong Kong and gave it great reviews, although I’ve never been myself. And for dinner we found an excellent and fairly cheap Chinese restaurant in SoHo, a little bit away from the escalator where all the overpriced food is. But it was quickly time to leave the expensive hotels and restaurants of Hong Kong — we only had about a day there, and then we took the bus across to the Shenzhen airport. I was a bit nervous to cross the border with my family — I knew everything would be fine, but I was anxious anyway — and then border crossing by bus was not as clean or easy as it is when you go from HK to Shenzhen by subway. But we all passed through mainland customs without a hitch, and after a delay of a few hours in the Shenzhen airport because of heavy rain, we took off for Guilin, our first destination in mainland China.

In the shuttle bus from HK to the Guilin airport, right after the border crossing, I encountered something of a major coincidence. There was another young guy on the bus, sitting next to my father and I, who I started talking to soon after we boarded after the crossing — a German guy a couple of years older than me who was also setting out with his mom to go traveling around China. The coincidences were this, in the order that I realized them:

1: He had also been teaching English in China, only he had been at it for two years and in Xi’an, and he had also been teaching German

2: He was also just starting out on a tour of mainland China with his mother

3: His mother had arrived in Hong Kong on the same day as my parents, and she would be leaving Beijing on the same day my parents would be leaving Beijing

4: They were also planning to travel to Guilin at the same time as us, and in fact had the same flight

5: They had been staying in the same hotel as us and the German guy, whose name was Jan (pronounced like “Yen” in English), had noticed us in the hotel

6: Jan was planning on traveling south through China after his mother left, just as I had planned to do, stopping in Xi’an and then continuing toward Taiwan

7: Jan and his mother’s seats on the airplane were actually directly behind my and my parents’ seats

There the coincidences (perhaps mercifully) stopped. Needless to say I ended up talking to Jan for about four hours straight and learned that he had spent about 3 years living in India studying Buddhism, that he studied sociology in university in Germany, that he was more or less sick of China and wanted to leave, and that he wanted to move to Taiwan to continue his study of Chinese, and that he was planning to go to Massachusetts in the fall to practice silent meditation for three solid months. He was a vegetarian and a non-smoker and I was able to identify with almost all of his views, except that he seemed to have been traveling and studying and meditating long enough to be far more calm and understanding of certain situations than me. And he was able to provide a lot of insight on life in China, particularly with respect to friendships, relationships and women — something I talked about with almost all the foreigners I met along our trip throuhgout the country (the foreigners who were living or had lived in China, anyway) since as I plan to sign for another year teaching English in mainland the reality of establishing and maintaining real relationships here becomes more of a necessity/reality.

Eventually, though, it got late, and I was exhausted, and I passed out in my airplane seat as Jan turned to his mom for conversation in German. My parents were already fast asleep on the plane; because of the delay, we wouldn’t make it to our hotel in Yangshuo, a small mountain town in the famous karst peaks in south-central China, until at least 2 in the morning.

Arriving in Yangshuo

I had booked a van to take us the hour and a half from the Guilin airport to our Yangshuo hotel, and when the lights of Guilin finally slipped behind us after the van reached the highway, we couldn’t see much out of the windows, except the occasional karst mountain floating by in the hazy dark like a phantom cloud. The karst mountains are plane mountains — they rise in great multitude from what appears to have once been a flat plane, not very tall or massive but sharp and jutting, like the image of a sound wave suddenly interrupted by a shout. They are so famous and beautiful that they are featured on the back of the Chinese 20-dollar bill. Everyone I spoke to who had seen them said they were one of the most beautiful places in China. But in the night they were just vague dark shapes moving slowly in the distance.

From our balconies in the hotel in Yangshuo we could see the nearby mountains and the river

We arrived in Yangshuo and checked into our hotel, and just as we were settling down to go to sleep someone set of fireworks in the park across the street from our hotel, and I saw the chrysanthemum-like explosions of fireworks outside at 3 in the morning. The next morning we woke up and stepped onto the balcony and looked directly out to the LiJiang river outside our balcony (we stayed at the Riverview Hotel, cheap, comfortable, with great service) and huge karst peaks to either side, towering over the little town and carpeted with green.