like mourning

OK, I realize it's ridiculous to call it a disaster, positively sacreligious to compare it to a death. But that's how I felt about it at the moment, right after the taxicab drove off into the dark streets of late night Beijing with my camera and about 640 hard-won, carefully-edited photos of Shanghai, Hangzhou, Chengdu, Xian, and most precious of all, Tibet. And although I can talk about it calmly, even wryly, now, the only feelings I could compare it to at the time were those that occurred at the worst moments of my life: breakups, deaths of loved ones.

And just as with mourning, there was a period I had to go through (in this case a good solid 24 hours of misery) before I could breathe normally again. How could one compare the loss of a camera to a death or a sudden breakup? Because a sequence of pictures documents a whole world, a coherent fragment of a life that exists outside of the fog and uncertainy of our brains, and being deprived of those images is like being cut off from that whole life. When my parents died, I realized I was completely cut off once and for all from worlds that I know existed vividly in their memories. The cousins, the uncles, the YIddish expressions my grandfather used to use, the addresses of the houses my parents grew up in, the color of their furniture, the names of their neighbors, the prices of the treats they yearned for as children -- my access to that whole world vanished in an instant, like the one-gig memory card that disappeared in the back seat of the taxi that I saw pull away from the Beijing Grand Hotel and turn onto Chang An Avenue toward Tiananmen Square three Saturdays ago.

The thing is, I had been so incredibly careful all throughout the trip. Among those in my group, I was probably the one most likely to go out into the city on my own, exploring in the few hours between scheduled events. And I'd always thought carefully about how I carried my valuables: my money and passport around my neck, my camcorder in a small shoulder bag I'd bought in Shanghai, my brand new digital camera, a Canon Powershot 600, in the zippered pocket of my right pant leg. And I had spent so much time and expended so much thought on what I'd photograph and how I'd do so. Most of those 600+ photos were pretty well edited; many were retaken a few times.

It all started because I wanted to learn about the Indie Rock scene in Beijing for the sake of my son Moses, a big Indie fan. I'd heard that the city had a pretty good rock scene and had read an article in "That's Beijing" about an Indie festival that had just occurred. A few of my younger fellow travelers made a plan to hit a club mentioned in the article. We'd just gotten back from a long day of touring and shopping and an evening at the Beijing opera. I was tired; I almost didn't go. Then there were the instances of real-life foreshadowing. As we left, my roommate, Dave, said, "Ah, I'm not going to bring my camera tonight." But I would, I thought, because I wanted to take photos of the club for my son. Then, when we got into the cab, 20-something Laurel remarked about how Beijing cabs now all offer receipts. "It's a great thing when you leave your cell phone in a cab!" she said. Forget my cellphone, I thought? I'd never done such a thing.

When we got to the tiny, hot club, a singerless trio was playing in a desultory fashion and the small audience seemed to be more focused on catching a breeze than hearing the tunes. One of my fellow travelers was sure we'd already missed the main act. I took a few shots and videotaped the band for a while, and then went out for some fresh(er) air. It was a humid, sultry Beijing night, and I'd really enjoyed the soft, misty look of the illuminated walls of the Forbidden City on the cab ride on the way over. But now it was after 11 and I had made a plan to get up early the next day to tour around the city with a friend, so I thought it was time to go. But I worried about finding a cab on this dark, deserted street. The first one that stopped refused to take me when I told him the address. Then a pedicab driver tried to charge me about 6 times the going rate. Finally, I found a cab to take me back, and as I drove through the quiet streets of Beiiing, I marveled about how lucky I was to be able to get around a great city like this for so little money (the fare was 11 yuan; I tipped him one yuan (which is not customary in China) in a spontaneous gesture of good will, reaching into my zippered right pant leg pocket for the bills before I got out of the cab under the canopy of my five-star hotel. A reflex made me look back at the seat as I walked toward the revolving door. Did I see something metallic and round? Or was that only hindsight? In a moment I was on the other side of the revolving door, finally in the airconditioned lobby, and out of habit I slapped my right pant leg pocket to feel the compact rectangle of my camera. But there was nothing there. Panicked, I began a slow motion lunge through the very slow-moving automatic revolving door. The cab had driven away, but bewildered by the traffic configuration, I didn't know in which direction. I ran up to the attendant and told him in English, "I left something in my taxi--which way did it go?" I was prepared to chase it. Clearly knowing no English, he brought me back through the painfully slowly revolving doors to talk to the desk clerks in the lobby. Suddenly, I remembered something that made me feel more confident. I had thought to take the receipt when I left the cab; surely this would have the taxi number; a simple phone call would put everything to rights. I knew it would be o.k. After some desk clerk jockeying, the one with the best English heard my story and issued explanations to the others in Chinese.

The taxi receipt was scrutinized. Phone calls were made. Recordings were reached. Buttons were pressed. More recordings were reached. New phone numbers were tried. And so on. I don't know how long all this went on, but I know that moments of horror and anxiety always seem to last longer than they actually do.

But still, it took a while for them to finally tell me, with satisfaction, that the taxi driver had been reached. And that he had picked up another fare. And that he had searched the back seat and found nothing.

I couldn't believe it. In my mind, I kept replaying the moment I slapped my pocket and looked through the revolving door at my departing taxi. Why hadn't I rushed faster through the door? Why hadn't I screamed? How could this have happened?

After a while I returned to the lobby and got the desk clerks to call back the taxi company and offer a reward. I got them to call the club.

Then I went back to my room and tried to sleep, dreading the moment that Dave would walk in and I'd have to utter the painful truth and thereby make it real. Every time I dozed off into a blissful, carefree snooze, I'd jerk myself awake to recognize the horrible truth.

The next morning, after practically no sleep, I had to steel myself to tell my traveling companions the news. They felt really bad for me, and took lots of photos of me. I moped through the muggy day, feeling it hard to look at anything in China without appraising its photoworthiness. I could hardly eat a thing all day.

That evening, after a fruitless shopping excursion, I came back too late and missed meeting friends for dinner. No one else was around. Finally, at 9:30, I knew I had to eat something but didn't want to go to a restaurant alone or spend a lot of money. So I did something I never do, something against which I preach to my children. Not only did I commit the cardinal sin of eating American food in a foreign country, but I performed the irredeemable sacrilege of buying food from McDonald's, even as I kept a half-read copy of Fast Food Nation in my bookbag.

I made my way alone to the nearby shopping street, full of the glare of neon. As I turned the corner out of the hotel parking lot, a modestly dressed prostitute began following me: "Do you need a lady tonight?" I walked fast but she persisted, walking quickly beside me. I managed to shake her just seconds before bumping into two other women from my group, whom I didn't want to know about either my destination or my recent companion.

When I got back to my room with my beer and my Big Mac, I decided I needed distraction and turned on the TV. Of the three English channels, I couldn't abide CNN or sports, so I found myself watching a National Geographic program which recreated an airplane crash, two days before I was to fly the 9,000 miles home. Only then did the grim ironies of life allow me to smile at my situtaion.

By then, exhausted from a night of no sleep and a day of sightseeing and shopping and mourning, I was able to fall asleep and experience the bliss of ignorance I so badly needed.

But my mourning wasn't complete until the next day, when I took myself through the litany of photos I'd never be able to see or point to in order to explain my experience in China and Tibet. Here are a few of the photos I will not have:

•Me standing in front of the colossal statue of Mao, my hand raised up waving, like his, to an imaginary crowd in People's Square in Chengdu
•Peddlers selling fresh fruit out of twin baskets balanced on a pole across their shoulders
•The tinkers and metalsmiths of Zhonghe city in Lhasa, hammering their metalwork and thrusting it into primitive, white, woodburning furnaces on the street
•The orange-vested, red-flag-wielding traffic "volunteers" at intersections in Chengdu
•The two Chinese men playing Chinese chess while sitting calmly in the middle of the floor of the Chinese market in Lhasa
•The young Tibetan monk on the Barkhor who offered to have his photo taken and then rushed up to see himself on the screen
•The metalworkers in an alley in Lhasa dousing a huge copper Buddha with some sort of chemical solution
•The scores of pilgrims in Tibetan dress spinning prayer wheels, clutching fragrant sandalwood beads as they cirumnambulated a kora
•The sun setting over the Potala Palace in Lhasa, viewed from the roof of a building in the Barkhor my first night in Tibet
•Two crimson clad Tibetan Buddhist nuns sitting outside a holy shrine, studying books.
•Slabs of raw meat hanging in open stalls in the Muslim quarter of Lhasa while proprietors flicked away flies with homemade contraptions made of knotted up plastic bags ties to the ends of sticks.
•The Tibetan monk who prostrated himself as he progressed around the Barkhor, wearing wooden blocks tied to the palms of his hands.
•The apprentice monk at Sera monastery who showed me around the chapel and signed to me what I should look at and which way I should walk
•The glow of a multiple-wicked yak butter lamp
•The picture of the artist who painted my Thangka at his shop in Lhasa
•The workaday green pedicabs of Chengdu and the colorful, fringed pedicabs of Lhasa
•The white exterior window valances in the monasteries in Tibet that undulate gracefully in the mountain breezes
•Chinese men walking arm in arm down the street. Tibetan monks walking arm in arm down the street.
•Tibetan kettles sitting atop solar burners in the monastery courtyards
•Groups of Buddhist monks sitting in a circle on the Barkhor plaza talking on their cellphones.
•The primitive pit toilet at Ganden monastery in a room with no toilet paper, no door, empty windows.
•Prayer flags flying from the outer compound walls of Tibetan village homes, their ornate front doors braced with brass

These and many other photos I remember taking will never perch, framed, on my wall or flash every few minutes on my computer desktop. They will exist only here in these words and in my memory.

the power (and weakness) of one

Like Adela Quested in A Passage to India, I always hope to learn about the "real" people of a foreign country by going off on my own. But in China, I discovered that it's also a good way to learn about stereotypes.

For most of this trip, I was with a tour group, which I'm not really used to. Usually, whenever I've traveled abroad, I've gone out of my way to try to do everything on my own, which, in one respect, means making as many decisions and creating as much stress for myself as possible. But sometimes it was exhausting to be part of a tour group, which seems counterintuitive to me. I mean, here I was staying in a five-star hotel, eating a buffet breakfast, being chauffeured around in an air-conditioned bus from preselected site to preselected site and somehow, I found the whole thing exhausting. I don't know if it was the effort that we had to expend listening to the many instructions delivered in accented English to ensure that we moved efficiently as a group, or just the typically inchworm-like progress the 22 of us made as we traveled together, always having to be conscious of who's in front and who's at the end, but it often made me, and everyone else, tired. However, while others would take the few precious free hours in the afternoon before dinner to do sensible things like lie around at the hotel or get a massage, I'd often strike out on my own into the city. This may not seem like the most relaxing course to choose, but for some reason, I felt compelled to do so. And I have to say, perhaps the most relaxing day I had was my free day in Lhasa, when my friend Jane and I got up (fairly) early, took a pedicab to the old quarter, rented bicycles, and biked all over town.

This was the day that we chose to see our third Tibetan monastery, after we thought we'd heard all there was to hear about statues of Shakyamuni Buddha and Lantern Buddha and the fifth Dalia Lama amid the burning of incense and the flickering of yak butter lamps. Yet we had a very lovely day, probably because there were just the two of us. Whenever we opened a map, a Tibetan would come up and look over our shoulders, trying to help us puzzle it out. As we negotiated the convoluted paths through Sera monastery, Tibetan pilgrims gestured to us and showed us where to go. The monastery, which had suffered great damage during the Cultural Revolution, still lay partly in ruins, and we peered into doorways leading into shells of buildings overgrown with weeds.
As we walked up one path, we heard the sounds of talking and digging and then came across a group of Tibetan workers singing as they worked on restoring a wall and a walkway. We stepped into an empty chapel and looked around and met a brown-robed young novice monk, perhaps 11 or 12 years old (although I'd been told the government strongly discourages training boys to be monks these days). He led us around the chapel using signs and gestures, told me his name (which I couldn't repeat correctly) and let me take his photo. He reminded me of Minky, the nun who had the day before led me through the old quarter of Lhasa trying out all her English on me.

The best (and some of the worst) memories I have, of course, are one-on-one encounters in China and Tibet. Being a tourist, and being Caucasian, I always stood out, even in places like Shanghai or Beijing, where there were lots of Europeans in tourist areas. Much of the time, people noticed me. (Sometimes, thankfully, they didn't, like the mornings in Shanghai that I snuck around the streets near my hotel watching workers eat dumplings and steamed bread off little plastic tables on the sidewalk.) And when they did, it was often to a) practice English or b) make money off of me. It may not be fair to generalize on such a short stay, but I think the latter happened more among the Chinese. My guide called them the Hello People. They'd be standing or sitting quietly, and then, as soon as our group came walking by, they came alive as if they were animatronic figures and we had triggered the infrared light beam that sets them into motion. "Hello!" they'd say in the tones of a native English speaker. Then it would be "Hello! Look!" or "Lookee! I sell you cheaper!"

Certainly there were Chinese people who said hello just to be friendly or to practice English, but nothing compares with the ingenuousness and joy of the Tibetans who would look at me and say something in English and laugh to hear me respond, as if I were an exotic bird or a talking koala.

My last few days in China were spent in Beijing, and I began to feel once again like a marketing target for people with all sorts of scams. Young, earnest-looking students would tell me about their artwork currently being exhibited in a nearby gallery--but I'd been warned about these sorts of appeals and just walked briskly on. It was easy to spot a prostitute -- "Do you need a lady tonight?" -- but sometimes I was unsure of what to make of the fresh-faced young women who would come up to me and simply ask me to talk to them for a while. We had been told people would sometimes want to practice their English, but we had also been warned that sometimes these are scammers, so each time someone approached me, I'd slip away.

Then finally, on my last afternoon, I went out to try to find some posters on a nearby shopping street, when I met Jenna and Lucia, two Chinese teachers probably in their early 30's who seemed like decent, earnest people who just wanted to practice their English. They were hoping to receive government appointments to teach Chinese abroad, possibly in the U.S. I'd heard of the program they were talking about. A number of school districts in the U.S. are hoping to get some of these teachers in order to jumpstart their Mandarin programs. They took me to a tea shop in a nearby mall and offered me fruit and sweets and told me about their lives: where they came from, what they hoped to achieve, what they knew about America (they had initially thought I was English or Dutch because I didn't fit the stereotype of the fat American). Jenna was from somewhere far in the southwest, in a minority region, and her parents spoke a very obscure dialect. She even had a sister, a rarity in China except among minorities. Lucia came from the northeast, not far from the city of Harbin. They told me they had just come back from a short hiking trip (they had taken a bus; they had no car) which they can do because as teachers they're on summer vacation. They asked me about my family and I told them about my boys, and I asked them to speak to my boys on video. I don't doubt that everything they said to me was genuine.

But then the bill came and I pulled out a few dollars (I was out of Chinese yuan at that point) to pay for my share. Lucia said, "Oh that won't be enough, what else do you have in there?" I was determined to pay for only 1/3 of the bill, which I did, but it was only later that I realized that the bill had been so exorbitant that it must have been a scam. I wound up paying over $20 for some tea and fruit and sweets in a country where is it no problem to eat a filling dinner with beer for $5.

I was depressed and angry for a while (although I didn't have the presence of mind at the time to follow them for a while to see if they returned to the tea shop), and was sorry to be leaving the country with such a bad taste in my mouth. But after a while, I was able to put it into perspective. Yes, I had been duped. I hadn't fully heeded the advice I'd been given.

But this was probably a case of stereotypes meeting stereotypes (which is often what happens when individuals meet individuals). These two were very likely a good illustration of the current story unfolding in China. They are part of the vast wave of internal migration to China's coastal cities, people who come to make the most out of their lives. Perhaps what they did was a bit deceptive and immoral. Apparently, with money and success as the new dogma, many Chinese have been left spiritually rudderless. Maybe they have a hard time getting by on their state salaries, perhaps because they're sending remittances home, and so they have to hustle a little to make some extra cash. When they saw me, they probably saw a lucky American who is rich enough to travel abroad, someone for whom $20 or $30 or $40 is not really a big deal. Which is true: it's as if I had a slightly pricey New York lunch or saw a movie with my wife or impulsively bought the latest bestseller at Barnes & Noble. It's really not a problem.

It's just one of the things that can happen when you're on your own.

warriors: terracotta and flesh

Xian, the ancient capital of China, is the place where you see the famous terracotta warriors, created for emperor Qin Shihuang in the 3rd century B.C.E. After the well-preserved, picture-postcard-shot city walls of Xian (constructed wide enough to allow an entire army to march on top of it and with gates that can trap an opposing army), the warriors seem to be the thing to see in Xian. They are amazing, astounding. And there are so freaking many of them! There are several buildings' worth, there are officiers, horses, charioteers--and they still haven't finished digging them up! When we were visiting them, on a typical, hot, grey, humid Chinese day, we were constantly held up because, as our guide, Joe Yu, put it, "a big potato" was visiting the site that day. Squads of green-uniformed Chinese soldiers marched in formation, and after seeing the first building, we had to wait to see the second. Immaturely, I wondered why we had to see the second or third building's warriors. Were they any different? (They were not.) Apparently, he created this army to protect him in the afterlife, which probably was a good idea for him because he was very much hated when alive. But why so many warriors? Why 8,000, or whatever number it is? Why not 1,000? Or 100? Couldn't he have deployed them in a way that belied their numbers but would still scare off any vengeful ghosts that came to attack him in the afterlife?
But maybe this was a good reintroduction to me to the rest of China after Tibet because it was a reminder of the numerousness that pervades every aspect of Chinese life. They just have a lot of everything, of every kind of person. Moderate-sized cities, of 6 million or so souls, abound in China, and are so unremarkable that most Americans don't even know their names. And when I think of some of the scenes that left me dumbfounded -- the hordes of bicycles crossing intersections in Chengdu, the swarms of people at the train stations in Xian and Beijing, the endless crowds of people waiting to enter the Forbidden City, the throngs of daytrippers filling up every last shaded seat along the miles of lakefront in the enormous Summer Palace -- they all have in common the theme of overwhelming numbers of human beings. This is why, in parks around China -- around West Lake in Hangzhou or the Temple of Heaven in Beijing -- people claim their own few square feet of space in which to exercise or practice calligraphy or ballroom dance or squat and stare into space. And this also offers some insight into some of the greatest manmade wonders in China like the 1,000 mile Grand Canal, the 2,000 mile Great Wall, and the 750 acre, hand-dug lake of Beijing's Summer Palace -- all of these are astonishing feats that were accomplished with vast numbers of laborers (sometimes slave labor) that Chinese emperors were able to command.
Today, this army of people is producing the huge piles of cheap goods that we Americans are always buying; these are the entrepreneurial warriors that assailed us, continually trying to sell us things as we traveled all over China.

third world

Last Tuesday, somewhat to my surprise, I came back to China. I flew from Lhasa, Tibet to Xian, in Shaanxi province, an ancient Chinese capital and the site of the famous terracotta warriors, and in so doing, left a third world country and was catapulted into a more sleek and developed future. This probably sounds stupid; everybody knows Tibet is a different country.
But China had been such a surprise, such a shock to the system that I really didn't expect Tibet to be all that different, in relative terms. Besides, so many Chinese had moved to Tibet, wasn't it practically Chinese already? Not quite yet.


This was brought home to me the day I visited the Tibetan Buddhist nunnery in Lhasa and lingered at the gift shop while my tourbus pulled away. Alone, I had a chance to talk to the two crewcutted nuns who sold me two pendants and a prayer wheel. As one of them tied a complicated movable knot in the string that held the turquois "Om" symbol that I bought, the other showed me a dirt-smudged elementary school English workbook and asked me to help her read the instructions. Then, when I asked for directions back to the Jokhang temple, the second nun volunteered to walk me the many blocks through the maze-like Muslim quarter of Lhasa, on the way trying out all the English she could think of. (This is not to say we haven't met very friendly Chinese--including a man outside a grocery store in Hangzhou who walked his bicyle over 5 blocks to help a fellow traveler buy a new memory card for her camera -- but there was something especially innocent and friendly about the people on the street who spoke to me in Tibet, vs. the many people in China who have seemed to want something from me.) As she walked me through the Barkhor, the nun asked me if this was my first time in Tibet. "Yes," I replied, "in fact this is my first time in China!"
"I have never been to China," she replied, "what is it like?"
Duh.

On my first day in Xian, I noticed the difference: as I strolled from my elegant French-run hotel past immaculate People's Square, I met none of the beggars I saw in Tibet who held dirt-smeared sleeping babies up to me and bowed down with their hands held out for money; nor did I have any runny-nosed five year olds tugging on my shirt chanting, "Hallogivemoneyplease." The white-fringed pedicabs were absent, although there was still a good quorum of bicycles. I wouldn't call the streets exactly clean, but I saw a lot fewer bodily substances make contact with them. Instead of open stalls of tightly packed goods, the shops hadt elegant glass facadeds that kept in the airconditioning surrounding artfully displayed merchandise.


OK, there are similarities: people are selling street food all over the place, people squat on the sidewalk and watch the world go by, there is the occasional beggar, and while there are actually "walk/don't walk" lights, vehicles seems to take them with a grain of salt.

But somehow, China just seems much more familiar than Tibet, which now seems like it is truly the other side of the world; children, when they dig, should aim for Lhasa from now on, it seems to me.

Tibet (including the Chinese enclaves in Lhasa) is clearly the Thirdest World place I've ever been. What really brought this home to me was the impulse, after returning to my hotel room at the end of my second day of walking around Lhasa, to take off my shoes, turn them over in the sink, and dump a bottle of Purelle on them and then scrub them under hot water. I also started laying a towel down on the floor before doing my back stretches. I guess this is when I sheepishly confess to those colleagues of mine at school whom I rib for being germophobes that there is a line for me, and I have crossed it, not only in Tibet, but also in certain parts of China. And the fact that I have been suffering for the past several days from Mao's revenge (despite avoiding tap water, ice and fresh vegetables) has only caused me to go through a lot more Purelle.

Speaking of Mao, we've heard a lot of interesting comments about him from our tourguides. Apparently, shortly after his death the official government position was to be critical of 30% of what he did. Now, among other things, it is very common to say that the Cultural Revolution was a big mistake, a fact which has been brought home to me over and over throughout my travels here. Guides never flinch whey they begin a sentence with, "Unfortunately, during the Cultural Revolution . . . . " They clearly don't say everything they think, and several have said that they prefer not to speak about politics. But Joe Yu, our guide in Xian, began talking about Mao's Long March and then went off on a riff that included the corruption of Chiang Kai Shek's government, the reasons why Mao didn't trust the U.S. even though he wanted to be friendly with us, the importance of "face" to Asian nations, and the reason why it was such a big deal when Nixon came to China. Joe told us about the day in 1971, when the news that the American president would come to China was broadcast over the village public address system (they had no radios or TV). Everyone was stunned into silence. He also explained why it was so significant the following year that Nixon, on Kissinger's advice, stepped off the plane with his hand extended to make up for the deep insult that had been perpetrated by John Foster Dulles when he refused to shake Chou En Lai's hand at a conference in 1953. (Fascinating, although Joe made no mention of the Korean War.)

It was because Mao seems to be fading from favor and there are so few Mao statues left in the country that I decided to have my photo taken in front of his statue in Chengdu, my hand waving just the way his was.

But maybe I should have been a bit more careful. Last night on the overnight train from Xian to Beijing, several of my fellow travelers were playing gin rummy in the bar car with a sent of Mao playing cards which can be purchased just about anywhere in China. Suddenly, I was told, a uniformed police officer strode over, picked up the deck of cards, threw them down in disgust and then announced, "This car is now closed."

Whether that was about hatred or reverence for Mao, I can't be sure.

buddha boom town (part 3): wheels

In China and Tibet, wheels speak volumes. I noticed this my first day in Shanghai, when I saw Mercedes Benzes cruise by three-wheel cargo bicycles stacked 8 feet high with bales of goods. Wheels, whether powered by legs or electricity or natural gas or petroleum, tell you everything about the user and the city you're in. For example, it wasn't until my third stop, Chengdu, that I started to see a lot of pedicabs and underpowered cargo vehicles, both symptoms of a weaker economy. In Lhasa, the colorful pedicabs were everywhere, covered with the characteristic scalloped white exterior valances you see fluttering in the mountain breezes over windows on traditional buildings all over Lhasa. Pedicab drivers tend to be Tibetans who can't speak much Chinese while more of the taxi drivers are Chinese who've come to Tibet to make money; both receive 10 yuan (about $1.30) for a trip anywhere in town.*

Traffic in all Chinese cities seems to be a mysterious game whose rules have a lot less to do with lanes and signs and signals than we're used to here, but in Tibet I had even more of a sense that a trip through town was one long series of near misses (or maybe that's just because I was viewing it from the back of a pedicab). People are constantly darting out into traffic at random; bicycles force themselves into the thick of traffic and turn without signaling; taxis and cars cut off everything smaller and weaker than they are: but the weird thing is, no one gets upset. On the wide, well-marked highways of the U.S., we've heard of countless stories of road rage. Who hasn't been cursed off or given the finger for making the wrong move or moving too slowly in American traffic? But in Lhasa, no one seems to mind any of the near misses or acts of poor judgment. Surely, there is a lot of honking, but the honk is a practical tool, not a vent for emotion. (All over China, we've discovered it impossible to sleep on our tourbuses because the driver as a matter of course must honk his horn every thiry seconds to ensure he avoids a collision.)
Maybe what happens in Lhasa traffic is that each driver survives by finding his own Middle Way.
The most important meaning of wheels in Lhasa, of course, is prayer. From what I can see, prayer is a kinetic process to Tibetan Buddhists. In order for it to happen, something has to be moving in a circular motion. It could be the large, brass fixed prayer wheels outside of monasteries and shrines; or the clockwise circumnambulation of a "kora" (or circuit) around a holy site; or the hand-held wooden prayer wheels that pilgrims spin while walking these koras. When these prayer wheels spin, the mantra of the Buddha of compassion -- Om Ma Ni Be Me Om -- which is written on coiled-up paper inside of them and is sometimes engraved on the exterior, begins to spin; the mantra is set in motion (or as the Tibetans say, "released") as it is chanted on the pilgrim's lips. Wheels and circular movement put prayer into being. Maybe it is this spinning that gives the Tibetan Buddhist his private space in the public realm, so that through all the hawking and spitting and giggling and chaos of Lhasa, there is always the spiritual, proceeding undisturbed among the secular.

*This reminds me of the most important change that has overcome Lhasa in recent years: like many cities in outlying areas of China, it has become a boom town for Han Chinese trying to strike it rich. I think the Chinese population of Lhasa may even equal or exceed that of the Tibetans. Huge swaths of the town are already Chinese, many businesses are run by Chinese, and, as I discovered by biking around the outskirts of town on Sunday, there is new construction everywhere. It's a sad fact, but it's also an unavoidable reality, and it's given parts of Lhasa something of the feel of a frontier town. At least that's the impression I got from location of my Chinese-run hotel, the Xin Ding, in the Zhonghe International Trade Zone, on an island in the Lhasa River. Right outside this would-be five star hotel (which, for the record, doesn't change money, doesn't have functioning room refrigerators [which means you have the privilege of paying outrageous prices for hot cokes and beers from the minibar], doesn't have adjustable air-conditioning, is erratic about the daily practice of vacuuming, is capricious in its deployment of pillows and soap, finds it unnecessary to hire English speaking operators, and seems to open the business center only when someone can find the key) was a warren of corrugated tin workshops where scores of workers hammered, sawed, and welded metal gates, doors, and cages (right up until 2 in the morning). Behind these were other metal smiths and tinkers, and other very basic restaurants and shops, all run by Chinese who seem to be just scratching out a living in these broken, trash-strewn, odiferous streets. There are certainly those who are very upset about this invasion of Chinese immigrants, which will only increase as a result of the new pressurized train that began service last year. And few have forgotten the brutal repression of the Tibetan uprising of 1959, the destruction of the monasteries during the cultural revoltion, or the violent suppression of Tibetan protests in 1989, just before the events in Tiananmen Square. The Chinese presence is felt not only in the myriad businesses and new apartments under construction, but also in the many military installations in and around the city, not the least of which being the huge party headquarters situated squarely below the Potala Palace, and guarded by green-uniformed soldiers standing at attention. But at least for now, the reality is that the Chinese are in the city, and the Tibetans are in the countryside. To the latter, geography is sacred; they circumnambulate not only temples and shrines, but also lakes and mountains. And while the Chinese may set up shop and sell prayer flags and jewelry in Lhasa, the holy city still derives its identity from the faithful who come from all over this vast, mountainous land, unperturbed, walking in a clockwise motion around their koras, spinning their prayer wheels, chanting their mantra: Om ma ni be me om.

buddha boom town (part 2): sacred space

Buddhas and Buddhists are everywhere in Lhasa. And Buddhism is a booming business, at least judging by the number of prayer wheels and sandalwood prayer beads and colorful Tibetan prayer flags and "parasols" (multi-colored hanging cloth cylinders that seem to be made of the lower ends of dozens of ties, decorated with tassels) haggled over at the innumerable streetside stalls. In our visits to the many shrines in Lhasa, we saw countless Buddhas in all their manifestations and reincarnations: gilt covered statues draped in shining cloth (some enclosed in glass), adorned with white "khatas," sitting in front of offerings of barley, corn, yak butter, or paper money. I knew going to Tibet would be special but I just wasn't prepared for the reality. I had visions of chasing Brad Pitt around steep flights of stairs while jostling the throngs of the Buddhist faithful. But maybe I should have taken a hint from the glimpses I've seen of the Dalai Lama's easy humor.
When we flew into the modern Gongga airport, a slow hour's ride from the city, our guide, Pemi, draped white khatas around our necks. Two members of our group, who had never been to Tibet, had tears in their eyes. The air, the landscape, the language, the people -- everything was different, even though the Chinese presence was everywhere, in the form of the vast amount of new construction, the Chinese signs, the Chinese food, and the green-uniformed police.
And the holiness is there, is everywhere. But the sacred here seems to coexist with the mundane, the mercenary, and the vulgar, and does so happily, not grudgingly. Certainly temples are sacred spaces: one must wear long pants and take off hats and refrain from snapping photos without permission. But the presence of the secular doesn't seem to impinge on the spiritual, as it often does in the West. As I navigated the streets of the old city of Lhasa, every 10 feet or so would come another pilgrim spinning an ornate brass and turquoise prayer wheel, fingering sandalwood beads, and chanting under his or her breath, while just behind monks might be walking happily draping their arms over one another, straining to hear on their cellphones, or giggling and pulling pranks on one another. Yesterday, my fellow traveller Jane and I sat in the shade at the outdoor teahouse at the beautiful Lhasa nunnery, drinking glass after glass of sweet, milky hot tea out of a large metal, cork-stoppered Tibetan "thermos," the same kind I have seen pilgrims carry through the monasteries in order to pour offerings of liquid butter into the butter lamps. Around us, Tibetans quietly chatted and sipped tea or ate momo, plump yak dumplings with spicy sauce, and occasionally people came up and spun the large, ornate brass prayer wheels fixed to the wall of the courtyard while the alto harmonies of chanting nuns issued from somewhere in the nunnery. Behind us in the hot sun, shaven-headed nuns in scarlet robes scrubbed laundry in a large metal tub under a primitive water faucet while others chopped vegetables in the shade. Within minutes there was a scuffling behind me and I heard giggling from the laundry nuns who were now engaged in a water fight, while from out of the open windows of the building behind them drifted the beautifully haunting tones of chanting nuns, still singing as they coiled up paper prayers for prayer wheels.
The levity doesn't diminish the spirituality. Each quality seems to have an equal right to existence; sacred space seems to be somewhat relative, and perhaps self-contained.
This first struck me on my first full day in Tibet as I walked through the majestic Potala Palace (the traditional political and spiritual seat of the Dalai Lamas until 1959 which overlooks all of Lhasa) and the Jokhang Temple (built in the 7th century by King Songsten Gampo, the founder of Tibetan Buddhism) which houses a solid gold Buddha brought to Tibet by the Chinese bride of the king. This Buddha is the nexus of three concentric "koras" or sacred circuits that pilgrims in Lhasa circumnambulate in a clockwise direction; the middle kora is the Barkhor route I've mentioned before. As large groups of tourists file through the chapels straining to hear their guides (some, having paid the fee, snapping photos), monks and other pilgrims sit chanting or spinning their prayer wheels or lighting their incense sticks undisturbed by the feet of the curious shuffling inches away from theirs.
Maybe this has something to do with the very different sense of public and private space in the East. Not only in Tibet, but in other parts of China, people stake claim to little bits of public space in which to conduct their private affairs. The Chinese are famous for doing Tai Chi and other exercises in public parks--I even saw a group of 8-10 doing their moves on a streetcorner near my hotel in Shanghai. Wherever you go, you see people claiming a piece of the earth simply by squatting and looking about them, perhaps holding a cigarette. In Chengdu, my fellow traveler Dave and I watched a group of men smoke and chat happily as they stood around one man sitting on a low plastic stool in the middle of the sidewalk on a busy main thoroughfare. Minutes later he picked up his stool, stowed it on the back of his motorscooter and rode away. Perhaps this sense of privacy in public goes some of the way to explain the unruffled behavior of Lhasa's faithful. But there's also something they seem to do to make their own spiritual space in their own heads, and it has to do moving, spinning, and wheels. More about wheels in part 3.

buddha (boom) town

One meaning of the name Lhasa, according to our Tibetan guide, Pemi, is "Buddha's city," or at least that's what I think she was saying as our bus careered insanely over the road from the airport to the city, honking incessantly as it overtook trucks, tractors, motorscooters, and three-wheeled cargo bicycles. And I've certainly seen a lot of B-dawg and his many incarnations and manifestations (there's a difference, but don't ask me what it is; Pemi could not explain it in English). There's present Buddha, or Shakyamuni, the historic Gautama after his enlightenment, known by his hair woven into a top knot. And because Shakyamuni has an expiration date of 2500 years, there's future Buddha. And just to show present Buddha didn't come out of nowhere, there's past Buddha or Lantern Buddha. And then there's compassion Buddha, or Chenrezig (a/k/a Avalokitesvara to the Indians), a favorite among our group, with his 11 heads and 1000 arms (he's a manifestation of Shakyamuni). Then there's Longevity Buddha, or Tara, a female Buddha with eyes in the palms of her hands and soles of her feet. Wisdom Buddha holds a sword and a book; medicine Buddha (a favorite of mine) is a Tibetan specialty. He's all blue because he tries all the medicines first before letting people use them. (Buddhists out there, please correct my errors.)
It's fascinating and overwhelming, especially when you're hearing all this in heavily accented English while shuffling along with twenty other camera-snapping, videotaping fellow travelers through dim rooms suffused with the smells of incense and yak-butter lamps, often over the backdrop of the chanting or drumming of the red and yellow clad monks who seem to be in every dark corner of the temple or monastery of the day. Travelers who've been all over Europe will recognize the ABC syndrome (Another Bloody Cathedral) in its Tibetan manifestation of ABM (Another Buddha Manifestation).
All I know is that my Buddha, the one I bargained for in the Barkhor market, is Shakyamuni. He's made of bronze, is hollow, and "is cheaper price." This started at 1200 yuan, but my "last blast" of 500 was accepted and I brought him back to my hotel in my pedicab, very much at peace with myself and the world.

with the pilgrims in shangri-la

For the past 48 hours, I have been following pilgrims in their progress around the holy sites of Lhasa, and I have to say, this has been one of the most incredible experiences of my life. I have walked beside young, middle-aged and old Tibetans in straw hats and traditional dress as they circumnambulate the Barkhor-- the holy circuit or kora around the ancient Jokhang temple in the heart of old Lhasa-- solemnly spinning Tibetan prayer wheels or gossiping to their fellow pilgrims. I have watched a dirt-smeared pilgrim prostrate himself repeatedly as he made his way across the ancient stones of the Barkhor, with the help of smooth wooden blocks bound to his palms that allowed him to slide his hands flat on the pavement when he prostrated himself, while his 3 or 4 year old son, tethered to him by a long woven band, followed along wearing the traditional one-piece child's garment with a vertical slit over the behind (presumably allowing for quick bathroom stops), as his father made his progress past the antique shops and souvenir stands that line the pilgrim route. I have seen dozens of others do the same in stationary positions in front of the temple, with the added comforted of a cloth-wrapped board on which to prostrate themselves. I have seen young monks dressed in brilliant, deep red robes over golden shirts, some with flat shovel-shaped hats on their head, fingering prayer beads and solemnly chanting as they walk. Old Tibetan women smile at me. Some younger Tibetans call out, "Hi!" or "How you doing?" and then giggle when I respond. One monk came up behind my fellow traveler and yanked a hair from the back of his arm, and then ran ahead laughing uproariously. Another young monk asked (through signs) if I wanted to take his photo and then clamored to see the image in my camera. The Barkhor is an amazing place, full of spirituality and mercantilism, suffused with the tinkling of Buddhist bells, the smell of incense, and the incessant cries of "Lookee! Very cheap!" from the hawkers at the souvenir stands that line the route. There's so much more to say about Lhasa. More later.

breathing easy in Lhasa

I am now in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, and am very happy to report that I am successfully breathing on my own. This may not impress those of you who haven't spent the last 72 hours planning how and if you will be able to breathe at an extremely high altitude (14,000 feet, I think), but there has been so much discussion on this trip (and even beforehand at our pre-trip conference in Seattle) that I was beginning to think I'd have to consciously plan and execute each inhalation and exhalation.
I'd been warned about the challenges of the high altitude from the very beginning, and we were advised to ask our doctors about prescribing a special drug to be taken 24 hours in advance of our arrival. We were told we'd have to keep ourselves well-rested and well-hydrated and to avoid alcohol. We were warned not to be too active today, and the only thing on the itinerary is "rest."
Always liking to think of myself as the rugged type, I was one of only three of our group of 22 who did not come with the altitude sickness medicine. (I was a little nervous that the other two had both already proven themselves at high altitudes, while I was a newbie.)
So you can probably imagine how I've been feeling these past few days while everyone around me was discussing how and when they'd take the medicine, how they'd deal with the potential side effects, and whether it made sense to run out and buy some Chinese herbs as a backup.
To make things worse, we were told to get up early and have breakfast at 5:30 this morning in time for our flight to Lhasa. So there I was, lying in my hard hotel bed at 10:00 p.m., trying to get to sleep, thinking of how exactly I'd breathe the next morning or what signal to give my fellow travelers the moment before I collapse into a flu-like stupor.
When I did get off the plane today and miraculously remained upright as I walked through the terminal, I saw, besides the colorful pictures of Tibetan herdsmen on horses, a concession selling altitude sickness medication and oxygen bottles. But when I stepped into the brilliant (and I mean BRILLIANT) Tibetan sunshine, I actually took what might have been my first true breath of fresh air this entire trip. The sky was clear and blue, the air dry and fresh, the sunshine so intense that I felt it through my clothing. This is a big contrast to the humid, polluted air of Chengdu, which lies at the bottom of the Szichuan basin, where people were complaining of having to blow their noses continually, and one woman collapsed of a combination of heat exhaustion and the side effects of the altitude medication.
Tibet is REALLY different from the rest of China. From the airport we drove through bare, rugged brown peaks that remind me a little of the Rockies or the tundra-covered Mont Jacques Cartier in Quebec. It's interesting how in this stark landscape the Tibetans seem to put color everywhere they can: their clothing, the roofs of their trucks and buses, and their houses. As we headed through the Lhasa river valley we saw Tibetan villages in the traditional style, one-storey clay brick houses adorned with intricately painted doors and windows. Behind them stood neatly stacked heaps of sliced yak dung to be used as fuel; from every roof fluttered colorful prayer flags. We saw prayer flags everywhere in the valley: fluttering from sticks in the shallow river, crisscrossing the sides of mountains like whimsical spiderwebs. Lhasa at first seems remarkably clean and modern, but that's probably because we drove through the western part, which is pretty much the center of Han Chinese economic colonialism here. Tomorrow, once we're adjusted, we head into the traditional Tibetan quarter and (I think) ascend the steps of the 7th century Potala Palace, which I can see out of my window . It's a long, steep ascent, but I think I'll be able to handle it. I do feel a little lightheaded and spacy, and my breathing is a little shallow, although that may be a result of getting up at 5:00 a.m. and thinking way too much about breathing. But just in case there's any trouble, there are oxygen canisters in my room.

Not so Hot in Szichuan

Surprisingly, the food in Chengdu, the capital of Szichuan, hasn't been ridiculously hot, although the peppers certainly are. I've had a lot of different dishes here that have come garnished by beautiful, bright red slices of these pungent peppers, which in this populous western Chinese province, are not the only hallmark of the local cuisine: they eat lots of peanuts, lots of tofu (we had four different kinds at dinner last night), and lots of mushrooms of all sorts. Sounds like a vegetarian's heaven except that there's meat in a lot of the tofu dishes. The group meals we have are always banquets served at big round tables with lazy susans. I always tell myself I'll try to write down all the dishesbut never manage to. Let's see if I can remember the lunch we had at a museum restaurant: we started with appetizers of thick, translucent noodles in spicy sauce,crunchy-yellow-vegetable-I've-never seen in orangey sauce, and something else. Then came the main dishes, one by one: a chicken and peanut dish, pork with 3 kinds of mushrooms, spicy tofu, shredded chicken and unidentified vegetable, huge plate of Szichuan noodles with spicy sauce, two plates of Chinese spinach, whole fishsteamed with ginger and soy sauce, squash or pumpkin soup, rice, watermelon, and individually wrapped "Uncle Pop's Roughage Party Cakes." (I know I'm leaving out several dishes.) But because we're American newbies, they really are taking it easy on the peppers, so overall the food has not been so hot.

And actually, the weather in Chengdu hasn't been so hot either. At least not today. From the moment I arrived in China last week, it's pretty much been one nonstop steam bath. In Shanghai and Hangzhou, we were all mopping our brows with sopping wet bandanas as we collapsed into our seats on our airconditioned bus. Yesterday in Hangzhou, the former imperial capital, I got up at 6 a.m. to avoid the heat as I bicycled around the famous West Lake (apparently the main reason that city is the #1 destination for Chinese tourists) but didn't manage to avoid the other 8 million people who apparently had the same idea. I think I saw most of the people of Hangzhou (and all of its retirees) on my nine-mile ride around the lake: riding bikes, stretching, strolling, doing Tai Chi, doing organized ballroom dancing (apparently for exercise), doing pushups off the curb, doing a sort of organized calisthenics involving a lot of slapping of one's thighs, flying kites, walking backwards--even practicing Chinese calligraphy on the park roads using a bucket of water and a calligraphy brush the size of a mop. When I got back to the hotel at 7 am I was drenched with sweat. But today it's been moderate--in the low 80's and so humid that when I was trying tovideotape the giant pandas today (guess what they were eating?) my lens was all misted up. Of course through everything we've seen, both beautiful and hideous, the sky has been a stolid, unmoveable gray. Only on the panda preserve did the sun threaten to poke through the clouds, but then decided it was too hot to bother. Still, Chengdu is a nice relief from the coastal cities.

Another thing that's not as hot here is the economy, although the government is trying to change that. The interior provinces of China have always been behind the coast, economically, and even though things are heating up, they'll never approach the frenzy of places like Shanghai or Shenzhen. Per capita income is 1/3 to 1/4 of what it is on the coast, and although the downtown looks reasonably modern and I saw a Starbucks and a Gucci when I posed to have my photo taken in front of the colossal statue of a serenely waving Chairman Mao, you can really tell the difference just by driving around the streets. The very streets, sidewalks and curbs are not as upscale and well-maintained. Many busy intersections seem dangerously devoid of traffic signals, and at busy times are manned by oranged vested "volunteer" traffic cops who wave red flags. Apparently, they can't arrest people, but if they catch a cyclist or scooter driver committing an infraction, they can make him or her hold their red flag for 20 minutes . Today the bus drove past rows of old-style tiled roofs covering warrens of alleys where people do their washing, hang out their laundry, and fetch their water. And the vehicles tell you everything.

In all three cities I've seen swarms of bicycles and motor scooters of every sort: two-wheeled and three wheeled, carrying goods stacked high and wide and with passengers precariously perched on the back. But here in Chengdu, I've seen fleets of battered green pedicabs of all descriptions, some with just a covered seat, others with a makeshift cardboard compartment suggestive of a 19th century stagecoach without doors. Another hallmark of a slower economy is the motorized vehicles. You see all sorts of underpowered vehicles hauling ridiculously huge loads. You'll come up on what looks like a small flatbed truck piled 7 feet high with bales of goods, and then see in the front an uncovered tractor motor jury-rigged to what is nothing more than a three-wheeled bicycle. As I negotiated the streets swarming with homicidal scooter drivers tearing throughy inadequatetraffic signals, I was amused to think that my guide first introduced us to Chengdu as a much more relaxed city than Shanghai. Supposedly, there's a huge tea house culture here, where people go to a tea house, order a cup of tea, and then just sit there all day. And it is true that you can walk the streets here without being assaulted by touts and hawkers. I suppose that's why, over the past ten years, Chinese from the coastal cities are coming to the interior provinces to set up businesses, and Szichuanese have been migrating to the coast to seek their fortunes.

One thing that may be too hot is this blog. Perhaps this is a delusion, but shortly after I posted the big brother post, I was no longer able to get into my blog. I had to send this one home by email and have them post it.

Well, time to go to bed. We fly to Tibet at 8:20 in the morning. Many in my group are feeling not so hot as a result of taking altitude sickness drugs (Lhasa is at 12,000 feet). I'm going to wait and see.

real tea flavor

I did not buy the emporer's tea. I am in Hangzhou, by all accounts the epicenter of the the production of the ultimate tea, in the one country more associated with the drink than any other. In the hilly lands outside of this former imperial city, well off tea farmers build their sturdy multi-story houses on the steep, winding streets that abut their terraced fields of tea, with the odd peaked-straw-hatted worker bending over the crops. Everywhere in the area you come across shops that sell the local dragonwell green tea, with workers drying the green leaves by rubbing them by hand in lightly oiled woks. But today we were at a plantation that purports to make the real thing in a land where every other product is a knockoff, a "jiade", or a "genuine fake" as our guide likes to call it. (Next to a bottle of Johnny Walker Black in a store last night I saw a nearly identical bottle of "Master Walker Red." Coffee shops like "Moca" shameslessly copy Starbucks' look and logo.) In fact, they have a statue of the Buddhist monk who supposedly discovered that tea helped him concentrate when he was meditating without eating food. Sometime later the Emporer tasted tea and proclaimed that he couldn't go a day without a cup.
But when Grace, our guide to the world of green tea, sat us down in a house on the tea plantation and poured hot water over our green leaves, the flavor was very much unlike the rich flavor of the fermented dark teas I've had in the past. It was a light taste (what she called "fresh" but others might call "grassy"). I know I've tasted tea like this before but never really returned for a second cup. But Grace took us through the various pickings of the tea, starting with the dark summer tea, going earlier in the spring to the grade A tea, and finally ending with the Emporer's tea, picked in mid-March. And after subsequent tastings; some atmospheric instruction in how one drinks such tea; the repetition of claims about the health benefits of green tea for those with a tendency to high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and diabetes; the parading and viewing and sniffing of successively lighter (and earlier picked) samples of tea spread on flat bamboo baskets; after all of this, many of the 20 of us around the table were awed when Grace's assistant brought out the kilo package of the Emporer's tea, beautifully wrapped in shiny red paper and ribbon, and then spread it out onto the flat woven bamboo basket for us to view and smell. We noticed the rich, full aroma of the Emporer's tea. We saw how much finer and lighter it was than the large, coarse leaves of summer tea. We crunched a few of the fine leaves between our teeth and noted that the taste was not bitter, just as Grace had promised.
So when it was time to get on the bus, one after another of my group -- even our tour leaders -- raised their hands and asked for the Emporer's tea, which Grace expertly packed by hand into bright red metal tins, despite its imperial price of 300 yuan per box (about $40). Some looked across the table searching for partners to "go in" with them for a "family" of three tins to save a few yuan.
I, however, coldbloodedly ignored the imploring eyes of my tourmates and settled for a box of the Grade A tea, for only 200 yuan, or about $26. I do have a cholesterol problem, after all.

big brother is watching

But he's doing a pretty sloppy job of it. This morning, my last in Shanghai, I got up to work out in the health club (we're talking 5 star hotels) and turned on BBC News (CNN was all about the car crash in Glasgow, 24/7) while I pedaled. They had a story on the 10th anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong, and at one point the commentary turned to frustration among Hong Kong residents with the Beijing government. Suddenly the screen went black for about 10 seconds. I thought I had jiggled something or hit a switch, but I notice the same thing on the two screens next to me. And then just as suddenly it came back on. At the time I thought it was a coincidence, but then after returning to my room to shower and pack, I had
BBC on again, and it had the exact same blackout. The ironic thing is that the blackout didn't completely eliminate criticism of the government. When the news report returned, it was to a clip of pandas that had been sent from the mainland to Hong Kong, and the voiceover was saying, ". . . but most Hong Kong residents want democratic reform, not pandas." That's a pretty lame job of censorship if you ask me. Later on the bus I asked the professor who is traveling with (and lecturing) us about this and he was certain it was censorship.
This may explain the spotty internet access I've had here. I was able to get onto my email a few times, but I noticed I couldn't open an attachment. And now I can't get on at all. And while I'm able to post to this blog (with great difficulty) I am not able to read my own posts! (So I apologize in advance if I repeat myself.) Today we drove south from Shanghai to the old imperial capital of Hangzhou, a big tourist destination for the Chinese, a city full of greenery and the famous West Lake (Xi Hu), which is right near our hotel. Apparently, this is the place that successful Shanghai businessmen have traditionally built their villas.
More later.

watch bag

This is the line I've heard probably more than any other as I walk down the streets of Shanghai. People say this to me all the time, in English, emerging from a sea of anonymous faces to look me squarely in the eye as I stride confidently down the street trying not to look Caucasian.
"Watch bag."
They're not warning me to watch my bag, which might be a reasonable admonition because Shanghai, although it is purported to be crime-free, does have its share of pickpockets. No, people are pointing to laminated cards they hold in their hands, offering to sell me things constantly, most often a watch (as in Rolex) or a bag (as in Gucci or Louis Vuitton) which is undoubtedly, as the Chinese say, "jiade" or a knockoff. Apparently there are knockoffs everywhere. Certainly the watches that a man outside the silk factory I visited today was selling were knockoffs: after selling several people in my group hand fans for 3 yuan (about 40 cents) , he tried to unload some of the 20 or so watches he had clutched in his hands. "Four for one hundred, ok?" (That would make them about $2.50 each.)
People are selling things everywhere, every moment of the day, it seems, in this communist country. Some cook food on little woks right on the sidewalk, or grill little kebabs on the skinniest barbecues I've ever seen. They're selling little sticky rubbery balls that change shape when you bounce them, or they roll right up into your face to try to sell you little skate wheels you can attach to your shoes.
Yesterday in the Old Town, another woman and I got separated from our group because we spent too much time looking through our lenses. We decided to use our guide's emergency procedure: ask someone to call her on a cell phone (there are over 400 million of them in this country). We found a teenager who cheerfully complied. As our guide came running down the street and we thanked the teenager, she pulled from her pocket a laminated card filled with pictures. "Watch, bag?"
It was reassuring to be in Old Town, just to know that there is some of Shanghai that looks like the China of the movies. One of the reasons there is so little of what looks like Chinese architecture here is that a lot of the city was actually built by foreign powers -- namely the French, the British, and the Americans -- who ruled what were called "concessions" right up until World War II. In fact, my hotel is in the French concession. As I've learned about these, I've finally begun to understand what the Opium War was about: the British were fighting for the right to deal drugs in the Emporer's 'hood. And won. No wonder imperialism is such a dirty word here. Anyway, there wasn't that much of Shanghai left that the emporer ruled, and that's what comprises Old Town. The concessions had mostly Western architecture, and in some cases there are some old buildings that have been preserved, but a lot have been knocked down for new construction. And that seems to be another big theme around here: knock it down, build something new, show progress. So many of the humble dwellings I've seen seem to be marked for demolition. But it's hard to say whether it's completely a shame. I pass alleyways where women wash their dinner vegetables in old, communal outdoor sinks; I can only imagine what the toilets are like. Even the factories are being demolished: the textile factory I saw yesterday is moving out to the suburbs; the silk "factory" I saw today was really a museum attached to a shop. They're trying to move industry away from the city center to reduce pollution and build expensive new apartments. This means working people will be removed from the city more and more and the city will become the home of the rich. But it seems the poor will always come here to peddle their wares. But will they be able to ride those dilapidated old bikes all the way from the suburbs?

Hu's on first

First stop, Shanghai, {known to local residents as "Hu"} which means "by the sea" or "above the sea" and is indeed a flat, marshy area surrounded and suffused by water. Wet is the operative word; the humidity is 83% today, there is a constant mist, and walking feels a little like wading in a warm bath. It rained on and off today, and I think I myself rained as well.

The most startling thing about Shanghai is that it's not that startling. So much of it feels like a Western city. It's so sleek, new and commercial that it puts a lot of the U.S. to shame. In what apparently is still a communist country there is entrepreneurship and advertising everywhere (even wrapped around the columns in the sleek new subway system). The hotel I'm staying in is 5-star, certainly far better than anything I've ever paid for and totally in line with where I stayed in Tokyo on my FMF trip, with a room packed with amenities I never knew I needed. (Actually, it is run by a Japanese company.) There are traffic-choked roads, Starbucks and KFCs, upscale European boutiques.

OK, ok, there are the quaint Oriental touches: little hidden alleyways that reveal courtyards; fleets of clunky looking bicycles with heavy duty baskets and fenders and not an inch of spandex or a single helmet to be seen; motorized scooters driven lazily by people smoking cigarettes or clutching umbrellas, shopping bags, or car parts; three wheeled delivery bikes (trikes?) stacked 6 or 7 feet high with boxes; men in A-shirts eating breakfast dumplings from plastic tables on the sidewalk; open air butchers and dumpling shops; a circle of older people doing tai chi on a street corner; laundry drying (!!) on hangers and hooks from every window; the occasional old-school peaked straw hat. We drove past blocks of quaint old-looking apartments and were told that they'd probably be demolished within a year. Everything seems slated to be redone here very soon, including the textile factory we visited today. No, there were no 12 year old girls chained to sewing machines, but we did sweat a lot. It was a factory that made cotton cloth on big machines that were very much like the ones I worked on at Kingston Knitting Mills in the summer of 1977 when I worked the night shift tending machines that knitted sweater material. It even smelled exactly the same! But I'm told this factory will be relocated to make way for more high rises, like just about everything else in Shanghai.

The food is amazing and cheap. Which reminds me--it's time to go to dinner.

pacific rim

It wasn't until early this morning in San Francisco (having flown in from Newark last night) that I actually sat down, calculated the time difference, and realized that I'm going to be on that plane for 13 hours, beating out by one hour previous Epic Journeys to Japan (12 hours in 2001) and Israel (11 hours in 1974). The truth is, ever since becoming a parent, I've been generally quite enthusiastic about time spent undisturbed alone in a cushioned seat with nothing more pressing to do than to decide what to read. The dentist's chair has for years seemed a blessed refuge. But this is going to be a lot of quality seat time. Glad I took the option of doing the first 6 hours to SF on the previous day. So this morning, before meeting an old friend for breakfast, I got out and walked along SF Bay to get a whiff of the Bay
Area I remembered from all the years I lived and visited here. There's that smell of -- dill? rosemary? some succulent plant? -- there are the wide, well-paved roadways, there's that warm but not suffocating feeling of the sun cooled by the bay breezes, there are the well-groomed exercise paths that seem to go on endlessly but never arrive anywhere real. It all brings to mind my first summer in San Jose 29 years ago, and the intense Asian flavor of many communities out here. Good place to launch.

preflight jitters

It's 9ish in the morning of my first full day of Freedom from School, and I'm skittering around the house gathering up items from the piles I've been making all this past week. My luggage is only at 33 lbs. What am I forgetting? The big decision right now is about books: serious work to help me understand the culture I'll soon be immersed in? novels I'll have to teach in September? or books about the evils of junk food and environmental horror stories to get me fired up on the flight to China?