Final Installment?

Saturday, April 17, 2010, 4:40 PM

There’s a lot of stuff floating around in my head right now. In a good way. It took a while for me to allow myself to find this second portion of the trip educational and inspirational and something I should be absorbing, because of how totally awesome Shanghai was, and how absolutely different this feels from that. So while parts are pretty illegitimate feeling, and über-touristy, I’m getting some good thoughts out of it.

And I feel like I owe you some Xi’an recollections, but there really wasn’t all that much that was crazy inspiring or interesting to me. I mean, the Terracotta warriors where pretty freakin amazing, and were a real highlight. But I can’t really expand on anything that a series of facts wouldn’t tell you. There are 8,000 of them currently unearthed, 6,000 of which can be found in Pit 1, the first pit discovered, which is that one that you’ve seen in the pictures. The craftsmanship is unreal. (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/TerraCotta_Color_and_Detail.JPG note the detail on the feet. This is the only perfectly preserved warrior. All others were destroyed by the emperor immediately following Qin [more on him below], because no one really liked him at the time [more on that below].)

Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, who is one of those awesome mixed-bag sort of figures, had them built around his tomb. He unified China and the currency system and the writing system, and is basically the reason the country exists at all, but he also killed a bunch of people and scholars especially and burned a bunch of books and things. (A really oddly clean parallel to Mao, now that I think about it. Mao  instituted simplified script, which is a real big deal, but he also killed a bunch of people, scholars especially, and destroyed a bunch of history. A connection worth thinking about.)

Qin also had one of the raunchiest armies in history (I think I remember hearing from somewhere, but I no longer remember if it’s a reliable source. I suspect I’m just getting it from Hero. Ya know, the guys with the arrows.), and so he instituted a policy that rewarded people for having a bunch of kids, so that in the future he’d have a gigantic army. Which is a big reason why China’s population is so gigantic, and  is why Mao (who I see more and more as a historical brother, of sorts, [how was that grammar? not so good?]) had to institute that  Of course, he died before that whole generation could get through, because everyone wanted to kill him, and a Daoist (I think I remember that, too. We learned it just the other day, but I forget if it was a Daoist monk or Buddhist monk, but it was one or the other. Not that they’re interchangeable.) monk told him if he ate a little mercury everyday, he’d become immortal. Which wound up killing him. His tomb hasn’t been excavated because his coffin is said to be floating in a pool of mercury, which is a pretty good way of keeping people from robbing your tomb.

But so anyway, that was really cool, but I feel I don’t have anything original to contribute to it.

These few graphs should be looked at. (sort of a continuation of the “China’s future doesn’t seem all that bright, sorry to say” theme from last time.)

Current(ish) age distribution of China (Population Pyramid): http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Pyramide_Chine.PNG

Previous, current, and predicted age distribution of US: http://www.nationmaster.com/country/us/Age_distribution

Trends of population pyramids: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/DTM_Pyramids.svg

The future is a tricky thing.

Today was our first day in Beijing. (Which is to say, I don’t have much to say about Xi’an. It was cool, and our foot massage was awesome, and we saw a lot of really old things, but it didn’t quite get my gears going. It was like a really cool nature show, or something. A lot of fun to watch, but you can only talk about it for so long, before you  realize that there’s nothing really to be said about it. We saw pandas, which were cool, and some of the pieces in the big museum in Xi’an where really nice. [Okay, there’s a point: I like how you could see the maturation of the art over time. Take horses, for example. At first, in the early societies, they were just doing little clay figures, content with making a simple horse figure, without any frills or details. Later on, though, as you got closer to and further into the Tang dynasty {the golden years of ancient China, I think}, you get a larger, more stable society, that can support artisans and craftsmen to sit around making horses all day. So the horses became more and more detailed, larger and larger, until eventually, instead of just making a lump of clay that basically looked like a horse, you got really detailed horse. And then you got a horse that was doing stuff. It was waving its head about, it was racing other horses, it was on its hind legs, it was carrying hunters about. The jaws were lovingly carved, as were the leg muscles, and the many situations and body positions dreamt up to put these raw, muscular bodies in were really spectacular. The maturation of art was in direct proportion to the stability of the society. And it was also freakin beautiful.] So sorry for boiling down 4 days of pulse-pounding travel into a couple of paragraphs. [Also we had a truly hellish gauntlet through which to pass in order to get to our train on time, which requires too much gesticulating, too many choice words, and rather a lot of stress on my part to recount, so maybe just the fact that I wound up sweating far more than I had in years while getting on a single [bleeeping] train can do for now.] Also I’m tired [from the train!] and apparently remembering things that happened 3 days ago is far too difficult for me right now. What a hellish slog that was.)

It’s a cool place, I guess. I haven’t got much of the actual city life, and I don’t expect to. Tourism keeps me from that.

I would be playing guitar right now.

Oh, and we biked on the ancient city wall of Xi’an. Which was really rather awesome. There are 4 gates and we only got to 2 of them, including the one that we started on, but it was still cool and fun. Nice and odd to be back on a bike again. No one does the standing walk bike technique sort of thing like we in America seem to do constantly, so I felt weird for doing that on the wall, and may have gotten more stares (than usual) because of it.

I’m not sure if I want to blend in or stand out anymore. People ask me to take pictures with them, just randomly, and it’s weird and fun. I usually let them, because how weird is that? I wonder if I’ll wind up on someone’s mantle place or something. That’s a weird thought. (“Weird” count: 3)

Or they just want to sell me stuff. In Beijing especially, the shopkeepers and the random people selling random stuff are really aggressive. They’ll walk in front of you and try to make you hold stuff. (I’ve used “stuff” in the past 3 sentences, mostly to refer to useless trinkets and the like. On a totally unrelated note, I have a sunflower that bobs back and forth in the sun.)

So, being a white-skinned dude in China, I’ve really no idea if I’ll ever achieve an air of legitimacy. Even if I wind up hanging with a good group of dudes for most of the time, and I am, for all intents and purposes, immersed and functioning in China (in my surely fictitious future vision), to the average shopkeeper or man on the street, I’m a dumb foreigner, I think. Which is probably just me demonstrating how little I can understand what it’s like to grow up in China.

The phones in this hotel have little video screens on them, and they play advertisements periodically.

At this point, with just a very few days left in the trip, I get to start wondering if this has all been more in the spirit of escapism than anything else. Creative frustration can only take you so far. Cleanse diet from all the crap of suburbia, or something. (These statements make sense to me.)

When I was in the throes of the college essay process, I was told not to write one of those went-to-costa-rica-and-I-saw-how-people-lived-over-there-and-now-I-appreciate-my-life-more essays, because everyone writes those. But isn’t that the single most important point someone can possibly  bring up? Am I being redundant and irrelevant if I want to talk about how much the world sucks outside of The Bubble? Will I be dismissed as a fool if I want to see what’s outside of The Bubble? Does anyone on the outside want a bubble boy like me living next door to them?

I just hit page 70 in my Pages document. That’s pretty cool. At the beginning, I set out to hit at least page 70, and here I am. 10 pages a week, for 7 weeks. I feel like I’m going to keep writing once I get back, to get to all those things that I forgot about, and maybe to do some editing and word smithing and things. It’s funny, my first post doesn’t sound anything like they tone I’ve (sort of inconsistently) struck upon. I’m not sure if I should leave it as is, or if I should make it more consistent with what I think I meant, and how I think I meant to say it.

We went to the Forbidden City, which I enjoyed a lot, but some people said it was sort of a let down, which I could almost see. It was sort of in disrepair at parts, but I sort of liked the fact that you could look at this or that pillar, or those stones, and realize they’d been there for over 500 years, and a good number of emperors had walked under over and around the very same structures. Not consistently pleasing to the eye, but I got a good kick out of it. I was psyched that I could read “The Hall of Supreme Harmony,” in Chinese, and realize that the literal translation is “Hall of Excessive Harmony.”

(excerpt [I kept thinking “excerpt” doesn’t have a “c” in that one spot, but I guess it does] from a chat with Mom [hi!] when she asked me how visiting Mao’s mausoleum [I’m also unable to spell that after 5 hours on a plane] was. His body

so there was this weird sense of tribute and festivity and mourning and commercialism [and capitalism! gift shops!]
8:39 PM
[mom: so what was your overall impression?]

my impression is that life is an interesting thing

Sunday, April 18, 2010, 9:13 PM

Just got back from a really weird “kung-fu” show, which was 90% interpretive dance, and the other 10% some unsavory combination of kung-fu exposition, dramatic master-talking-to-young-student dialogue, and scarf symbolism. Everyone else seemed to like it, but I really didn’t. Then again, comparing a bunch of dancers who do 5:30 and 7:30 weekday shows pretending to be monks with the legitimate, for serious Shaolin Monks I’ve seen a couple times at the the Orpheum isn’t exactly fair.

I keep winding up in really, tremendously touristy places, and it’s making me feel dirty.

So you know those restaurants with the Lazy Susans (is that a proper name?) in the middle? And they just bring out a bunch of food, and you spin it around and it’s a grand old time. Well, that’s how you usually eat at restaurants, unless it’s a hot pot. So, now that we don’t have any native chinese dudes eating with us, when we wind up in those restaurants, the Lazy Susan etiquette just goes out the window. You can clearly see that we’re all inept at getting it going around nice and smooth. We go around in both directions, and it speeds up really fast and slows down randomly, and people don’t check when someone else is trying to grab some food. There’s an elegance in the way native chinese dudes can wield these things. There’s a clear sense of flailing about when we use them.

Monday, April 19, 2010 6:54 PM

Well Beijing has been interesting. Summing it up would go something like this: “We’ve been sold stuff.” Sold touristy (I really don’t know how to feel about that being an actual word) trinkets, sold watered down versions of Chinese history, and sold sugar-coated and poorly fictionalized versions of China’s current condition.

Being a tourist sucks. I think we’d all much rather be in Shanghai right now.  Our tour guide is pretty lame and we're being taken to all these really tremendously crappy touristy places where foreigners wear matching hats and have laminated name tags. We get taken to places just to get stuff sold to us. "You want to go to a 'silk factory?!'" "No, we've already been to a silk mall." We’re pretty sure she makes commission on all the crap we buy when we get there. Today we started saying we didn't want to go to this and that place, and now we think the driver and our guide are mad at us, which is a weird sort of predicament.

We've been served American Chinese food in China for the past 3 days straight. It's really absurd.

Right now is when I should be packing.

The Great Wall was pretty awesome. We took a chairlift up, because apparently the most exhausting part is just getting up there in the first place. And then we set out on the crazy up-and-down-and-up-and-down portion of the wall, as opposed to the nice and flat section, which turned out to be totally amazingly worth it. I’m really not sure if I can begin to capture it.

Awesomest news in a long time? http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20100416/sc_space/nasasnewasteroidmissioncouldsavetheplanet

P.S. Bill Nye is quoted, who turns out to be the Vice President of the Planetary Society, “A nonprofit organization devoted to the exploration of the solar system and the search for extraterrestrial life.” Yes.

April 23, 2010 10:15 PM

The plane actually has XM radio stations, which means I occasionally luck into a good song or two. “Get Back,” (Beatles, doi), and “Us and Them” (Pink Floyd, also doi), are the latest choice selections.

So. Leaving China? At this point, not such a big deal. The main shock came from leaving Shanghai. I didn’t become too attached to either Xi’an or Beijing, although I’ll say that Xi’an was a lot better than Beijing, and leaving now seems more like stopping the misery than anything else.

Oh man, I caught the last 3 songs of Dark Side. Ahh yeah. Wow, this last song is crazy fitting. “And the sun is eclipsed by the moooooo-oon”

Oh, I got sniped by the checked baggage x-ray machine thing. They called my name over the loud speaker and everything. I had some lighter fluid fuel in my bag, and they made me take it out. Which is funny, because I have another lighter nearly as big as my forearm, (filled with even more fuel), and they didn’t make me take that out. (Hi, mom!). I’m pretty regularly stopped for security checks wherever we go, because I’m an odd looking foreigner. The people where giggling when they saw my passport picture, which is always interesting.

I’m tired and excited to get back to life and things. Make good use of what I learned and all, but I’m also mildly wary of all the crap that I’m gonna wind up putting up with. One more month of high school, anyone? Prom? “Where are you going to college?!” etc. But then it’ll be done, and I’ll actually be living, for a while, and that should be good.

“All Along the Watchtower” Thank you, Jimi. Thank you, Bob.

It’ll be weird being plugged in again. Cell-phoned and facebook-ed. I was able to avoid that, to a certain extent, (except I got a cell phone from the family [I said that, right?], which made me sort of text-y, but mostly with Jason and peeps, so that was cool. Much less plugged in than I am at home, at least.

The other day (and by that I guess I mean lunch from today, which seems like it was a long time ago, for a variety of reasons), we went to perhaps the worst quality touristy lunch buffet ever ever ever. They didn’t have chopsticks, and tried to make pizza on toast and made juices out of powder, etc. etc. But so they didn’t have chopsticks, and I’d had a solid month straight of not having used western utensils, so it was really freakin’ annoying have that record broken by my very last meal in China. But my point: I used the fork like a pair of chopsticks. I nudged the food in the way that I would’ve to prepare it to get picked up by my chopsticks. I kept trying to put a whole big chunk of a thing in my mouth, take a bite, and grab it back out of my mouth, as is SOP with chopsticks, and really the only way to eat the bigger things, because knifes are exceedingly rare, and even unnecessary. But so I kept trying to pop a chunk of meat or something in my mouth, and then stab my fork back onto that chunk, while it was in my mouth. Which doesn’t work so well with forks. And I only noticed it after I kept trying to do it a coupe of times, and even after catching myself I tried once or twice more. I’m working out the logistics of bringing chopsticks to school, for lunch. We all lifted a pair from the hotel this morning, because they were pretty good quality, and we felt justified, because the hotel was expensive and not that good. (That’s reason enough, right?)

American Idiot just came on the radio. I’m generally unsure how to feel.

Wednesday, April 21, 2010, 2:33 PM (Back in American time, I guess.)

Maybe that’s a good thing, overall. To really not know how to react. Being assured of anything means you’re wrong, on some level. For some reason, James Gatz of The Great Gatsby comes to mind. “Personality” was sort of described as “a long chain of unbroken gestures,” or something, and the sentiment makes a good case for how being definitively sure of something is a sure sign of idiocy, instability, or some combination of the two. There will always be another shade of meaning to consider, another tiny implication that’s been forgotten or out of our reach.

Which I’m struggling to make less abstract, get it a little more tangible, but I don’t know exactly what case I’m addressing. When I’d find something new, experience something I’d never experienced, meet someone I’d never imagined existed, have to do something that had never been asked of me, how can being perfectly decisive benefit anything? I’d known essentially nothing of what there is to consider. So you exist in that gray area. And while the examples are less clear in more familiar environments, the same basically holds true in all of our experiences. No matter how totally familiar we are with a certain situation, there is at least a small chunk of knowledge that eludes us. And so there is a gray area, and we exist within it. So becoming comfortable with uncertainty is a pretty good course of action. I think I’ve learned that on this trip. That for a gigantic portion of life, you’ve no clue what’s going on. And that’s okay.

Revisiting albums is always fun. I listened to Tera Melos’ unnamed album yesterday, which is always immensely satisfying. (But if you want to get into them, which you should, I’ll start you off on their demo.) And now I’m listening to Blink 182’s Take Off Your Pants And Jacket (please don’t look to hard for the sexual innuendo, mmk?), which is really an excellent album, which I haven’t listened to in its entirety for a long time. A couple weeks ago I went on a Captain Beefheart binge. I’m not sure why I’m writing about this. I like music. I wish I were playing guitar. I have so many things to play. My callouses just started peeling, which is sad. And it means I’ll have to play a lot before I’ll be comfortable enough to go through my whole song writing process thing, so that’ll be interesting. A Cake phase a week or two ago. “Cake Phase” is a really good phrase.

Here’s a funny story. So we went to this market in Xi’an, which was one of the better markets we’ve been to in China. So we went around buying a bunch of stuff. So I spotted this pretty cool (but mostly sort of lame) Starbucks Coffee Shanghai t-shirt, so I figured I’d get it for the pops (cuz if you know anything about Dad...) So I pointed at it, and bartered for a minute or two, and got it for a reasonable price, and I was all satisfied and everything. But I missed a step in the whole process, which was to check the size. I checked it the other day, and it turns out it just sort of barely fits me, which means it won’t fit Dad (cuz if you know anything about Dad... I jest, I jest), so I have this pretty lame Starbucks t-shirt now. And then, packing up last night, I realize that it’s my only clean t-shirt. So now I’m wearing a loser-y touristy shirt, and feel silly, in general. Like that Onion headline, (I have a lot of those memorized... I’m oddly proud) “Shirt Demoted to Night Shirt.” Anyone want a red and green Starbucks t-shirt? (P.S. Now that I’m home, it got sent through the wash, and sort of made all of my socks pink.)

Tuesday, April 20, 2010, 6:07 PM

So we just arrived after that (I can’t think of words now. I’ve been awake for 22 hours straight. Don’t tell anyone.) flight. I talked to a bunch of random people on the plane, which was interesting. A chinese dude, a swedish girl. Okay, just the two. And then once we got off, there were a bunch of Chinese dudes being subjected to the rigors of American airport assistance. So I hopped up, and spoke what little I could, which wound up being really helpful. There were a couple of people being told to GO UP THAT ESCALATOR, TURN RIGHT, GET ON THE TRAM, TAKE 2 STOPS, TAKE A RIGHT, AND WAIT FOR 4 HOURS, so I thought it appropriate to intercede, saying (in mandarin, essentially), “follow us until we tell you to go over there.” An old couple was going to Memphis, and another women was going to Kansas City. Cool stuff. I’m useful. It was sort of a magical couple of moments.

It’s really weird to be able to overhear conversations. I find myself listening to entire conversations, fascinated that I can understand it all. And then I catch myself, and pretend to not be able to understand anyone, like the good old days, but it doesn’t work so well.

I’m really glad I bought some good chopsticks. I’m not sure how adjusting to western utensils will work now, because I’m totally going to be using the chopsticks whenever I can.

I just went to the airport bathroom here, and I had a moment of hesitation as I wondered if they were squat toilets. It’s going to be weird adjusting. Little things will sneak up on me, I think. Things I’m sure I didn’t even notice, as I was adjusting to them.

I just realized that the internet isn’t blocked over here. What should my first youtube video be? Answer:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt34aHAFkV8 (It’s a clip from that movie that I found playing in a movie store, but the guy didn’t know what it was. Thank you, IMDB.)

Anyone ever heard of a guy named Michel Polnareff? He’s this snazzy french dude. I got a random song of his while trying to download a random song of someone else’s. Good stuff.

I just did a bunch of mandarin homework, typing some essays in Chinese. (By the way, I’ve tried to refer to the written language as “Chinese,” because the writing is unified across all dialects of the Chinese language, and I’ve been referring to the spoken language as “Mandarin,” because that is the dialect [is it considered a dialect if it’s the most common form of the language?] I am learning to speak. Using “Chinese” to refer to the spoken language is ambiguous and ignorant to the fact that there are tons of ways to speak the language. I’ve at least tried to be consistent with those semantics.) Writing in chinese was disconcertingly (and wonderfully) easy. Yeah know, relative to before.

That basically covers it, right? I’m tired and I smell and I learned a lot and I’m glad to be home but I’ll go back in a heartbeat.