POSSIBLY MORE ETHNOGRAPHIC DETAIL THAN YOU EVER WANTED ABOUT TAKING THE TRAIN IN CHINA

My passion for China is both intellectual and visceral: I love the challenge of comprehending the country’s history and trying to understanding how its people have dealt with the tragedy and tumult of the past century and the extraordinary changes of the last few decades, but I also adore the chaos of being here: the noise, the crowds, the smells, the tastes. Frequently those very same things drive me insane but my frustrations can be neutralized in a moment by a conversation with a friendly stranger or a glimpse into a tiny shop where mom and pop are bent over steaming bowls of food while a grandparent chases a well-padded toddler.

It feels comfortingly human to see life lived so publicly and I think it appeals to me especially because it is so different from the neutered suburb where I grew up, a place that always rang false to me with all its groomed lawns and drapes drawn against the outside. I’ve always found it creepy to walk streets empty of people.

Even among my China friends I have an unique affection for train travel; it can be tiring, crowded, and profoundly unhygienic yes, but it also allows me to be in the midst of all this human chaos and to chat with and observe regular folks while seeing the country rush by. It was in this spirit that I steeled myself to enjoy/endure a 20-hour trip from Guangzhou to Beijing last week in what is unflatteringly termed a “hard seat." I usually travel by hard bed, a bunk with a firm mattress a few inches thick in a compartment with five others, but due to the October 1^st holiday there were no beds whatsoever to be had on any Beijing-bound trains for days and so I told myself it was time I experienced this most challenging form of train travel.

My $37 ticket bought me a seat which was not, to my enormous relief, hard plastic, but a very firm cushioned seat fixed at a near right angle, forcing its occupant to sit ramrod straight. My carriage sat 120 people in rows of ten that faced each other with a small half table in between. When we boarded in Guangzhou there were a few people without seats who had bought “standing tickets”. A few of them took over seats when they were vacated but the unluckier ones crouched on stools in the entrances or draped themselves over their luggage.

My seatmates were as follows:

A 20 year-old southerner working as a carpenter in Beijing, boyishly handsome with the fluffy Chinese-bieber hair so favored by young men. He spent most of the first few hours of our journey reading a book called something like “Mysteries of Paranormal Phenomenon”, snacking on individually wrapped pickled chicken claws, and playing with his Spongebob Squarepants-charm adorned cell phone.

A 40s-ish small-scale buyer for Beijing retailers wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt that read ONE ON ONE Right Here Right Now IN YOUR FACE. He sat next to me in the aisle seat and was the first to attempt conversation, asking me first if I was Russian and clearly pleased to learn I was in fact American, as “Americans have a lot of money.” The fact that this American was traveling via hard seat and not, say, a chartered helicopter, didn’t seem to alter his perception.

An attractive woman in her late 50s who lived in Beijing with her 30-year daughter but had been visiting her hometown in the south over the holiday. She wore a string of peach-colored pearls against a rhinestone-studded red sweater and red jacket and by some dark magic maintained perfectly coiffed hair and make-up throughout the journey. She also rapidly emerged as the alpha of our row, dominating conversation and commanding the respect of the men who all called her “ayi” (aunty).

A flamboyant 32 year-old dance teacher and occasional DJ who lived with his wife and young son in a district outside Beijing. He held only a standing ticket but managed to take over a seat in our aisle, encouraged by the woman above with whom he discovered he shared a hometown (their distinctive regional accent tipped him off). The dance teacher had spiky hair tinted red and wore two large rhinestone studs in each ear and a hot pink polo shirt. He also had perhaps the most irritating cell phone ringtone I have every heard: a shrill chirping of a dozen or so birds set to maximum volume. His phone rang frequently well into the night, earning bitter glances from our last aisle-mate, a man in his late 40s who spent the entire trip reading and never spoke a word to anyone.

We departed at 6:05pm and everyone got acquainted rapidly, chatting too with the four other passengers across the aisle. The most popular topic was of course food: which region has the best cuisine, how expensive pork and vegetables have been getting, how to prepare certain dishes, and so on. The “aunty” in my row had a great deal to say on the subject, telling us she always learns the local dishes when she travels and describing in great detail a pumpkin, sweet potato, ginger, and crab dish she made that afternoon for her relatives.

Compared with the mouth-watering talk, the reality of food on the train was deeply disappointing. I, like many of my fellow passengers, ate a large bowl of packaged ramen (a health-less food I adore but rarely indulge in) that I brought with me for dinner – boiling water flows freely from a tap at one end of every carriage, which is also what many people drink – then snacked on sunflower seeds and fruit. There were boxed lunches of rice and greasy meat and vegetables available at dinnertime and in the morning and afternoon but they were almost inedible. Trolleys passed through the aisle every half hour or so offering chips, crackers, sausages, or plastic-wrapped produce in a consistent state of not-quite-ripeness: apples, bananas, dragonfruit, cucumbers, lychee. The dance teacher considered buying something several times but thought the price, 5 kuai or about 80 cents, too steep.

The talk was liveliest when all were bemoaning the price of real estate as well as during a fascinating (though perhaps only to me) conversation about whether brands that call themselves imported can be trusted. After "aunty" buried her nose in a book on Confucian ideals the dance teacher chatted up the carpenter and they shared anecdotes about cats.

In the hard sleeper carriage the lights are turned off at 10pm sharp but in our carriage they only dimmed at 11:30 and never went off completely. Around 11 "aunty" closed her book and announced we should find something to do with ourselves to pass the time. With the fragrant smell of baijiu wafting over from a nearby row she jokingly suggested that the dance teacher, who had been moaning that he wanted a drink, go and join them. “I bet he’d be falling over after one drink!” teased the businessman next to me. We all laughed and Aunty, who said that an “old wife” like her couldn’t possibly keep pace with the young men where drinking is concerned, suggested cards. Thus began one of dozens of rounds of the game “Dizhu” (Landlord), a game quite similar to “Asshole” in its rules of play, but with less flattering connotations to those in property management. The game and its associated trash-talking and merriment attracted the attention of our neighbors in the same way Chinese Checkers played on the sidewalks of Beijing always draws a crowd. Those who weren’t yet sleeping or attempting to do so stood on the sidelines or peeked over their chairs. At a break in play around midnight I excused myself to brush my teeth, passing rows of people sprawled in grotesque positions, bodily boundaries everywhere compromised by the arms and legs of the comatose.

When I returned to my seat I began the business of trying to sleep, employing the following positions over the course of the night:

Slumped over, head resting on book

Head against wall on pillow

Feet tucked under (with variations)

Legs up against chest cushioned by pillow against table, head back

Legs up, feet resting on the interstice next to the seat of the man across from me

I woke countless times throughout the night but probably got as much or more sleep than many: my seatmates were wrapping up a final round of Landlord when I woke briefly at 3:30 and were wide awake at 9:00 when I surrendered to the morning. By this point I was still feeling positive about the trip: a little stiff and looking forward to a shower but generally lively and amused by my companions. This all changed when we arrived in Shanghai at 9:30. I had planned to hop off the train when we stopped at the station to get some decent food from a vendor and stretch my legs but before I could debark there was a rush of people boarding the train, pushing rudely and searching anxiously for empty seats. I returned to mine, not wanting to lose it, while the aisles filled up with an extra 40-50 seat-less passengers and their luggage, all of whom remained there for the next five and a half hours. It was worst when the food carts came through and the standing passengers had to squeeze both themselves and their luggage into the spaces between those of us sitting. I got up only once more before we arrived in Beijing, squeezing through bodies that even filled the aisle adjacent to the toilet and the bend between the train carriages.

I was hating the world and ruing my romantic notions about life in China for those last few hours trapped in my seat surrounded by agitated standers but my seatmates seemed to take it in stride, starting another round of “Landlord” and talking happily about their plans to sleep away the rest of the day. Approaching the outskirts of Beijing the air quality declined noticeably until we were traveling through a thick chalky grey haze (I later verified my suspicions that the air pollution index was about 100 points over the “hazardous” benchmark of 300). The movie that had inexplicably been playing over the intercom for the last hour or so (replete with the sounds of sword fights and loud arguments) gave way to the aggressively patriotic tune “Ai Wo Zhonghua” (I love my China) and as we rolled into the station, nearly everyone already on their feet ready to rush off the train, a man near me started to sing along in falsetto, seemingly unconsciously. It was such an ironic, maddening, and even comedic scene that I couldn’t help but be amused. I pushed my way into the human tide overflowing onto the platform, breathed in the slightly malodorous air, and surrendered myself once again to the chaos of the capital.

P.S. Here are some pictures from the south...

Pedestrian shopping street, Guangzhou:

Couples posing for wedding pictures (usually taken a few months before the wedding) on Shamian Island, Guangzhou:

Fabric market, Guangzhou:


Campus of Sun Yatsen University, Guangzhou:

Man fishing in Kowloon Bay, Hong Kong:


Bruce Lee statue, Hong Kong:

Students playing freakishly large harmonicas, Hong Kong:

Porcelain Guan Yin, Hong Kong Art Museum:

Teen dance recital, Hong Kong:

Cat sleeping behind persimmons, Guangzhou:

The 2,000 year-old tomb of the Nanyue Emperor, Guangzhou:

Jade burial suit of the Nanyue Emperor:

Jaw and cranium fragments!

One of the dozens of jade disks buried with the emperor:

Ancient ginger grater:

Sample of the "multi-colored stone medicine" favored by Han Dynasty elites and including sulfur, arsenic, and turquoise (one possible cause of the early demise of the Nanyue Emperor):

River view, Guangzhou:

Delicious fruit bounty, Guangzhou:

Seriously, fall is the best time for fruit eating in this region: in the north pomegranates, peaches, red dates, and persimmons, in the south figs, mangos, pomelos, starfruit, mangosteen. A heavenly bounty.

SPINNING MY WHEELS IN SHANGHAI

The fact that I've spent almost two and a half years in China doesn't make me any more immune to the glamorous connotations of certain names and places. I may lament that I am stuck in Shanghai, having been unable to get tickets out of here until several days after I had planned to leave, and I may really mean it, but even writing the words out makes me shiver a little at the exoticism of it.

The thwarting of many my initial travel plans led me here and the insanity of getting train tickets during the October 1st National Day holiday has kept me here for 8 long un-exotic days. While I did manage to meet and interview a new contact I've haven't done much else and that has been quite frustrating. Tomorrow I head to Guangzhou to deal with another fiasco: in its eternal wisdom the Chinese consulate only gave me a 30-day visa so I have to leave the country to renew it. It was either Hong Kong or Mongolia and the former won out because I have a lovely friend I can visit in Guangzhou just over the border.

I came here mostly because my friend Dan (of panda suit fame) moved to Shanghai a few months ago for his fancy new job. He lives on the top floor of this charming old building in the former French Concession, a part of the city still characterized by wide tree-shaded boulevards, cafes, and profoundly European residential architecture.

There are still pretty art deco stylistic elements on many of the buildings in this part of the city, though from a survey I've conducted from the back of Dan's scooter I believe the composition of the Concession is roughly 65% high-end ladies boutiques, 15% high-end children's boutiques, 10% high-end home furnishings, 8% cafes/restaurants, and 2% practical goods and services for the common folks. I find most of it incredibly vulgar. About 100 feet from the gate of Dan's building one can have a custom Ermenegildo Zegna suit made then cross the street, genuflecting to the luxury vehicles speeding past, to purchase a gilded table and real fur throw blankets for your parlor.

Walk a block in the other direction and you will come upon these obscenities. Yes, those door handles are made of beveled violet glass, and yes, those chairs with red velvet cushions have glass backs etched with swans.

It isn't too much of an exaggeration to say that the whole city looks like this, or at least that it wants to.

Some of the cafes are nice, and I can't complain about the fresh fruit crepe I had my first morning here but I can and will complain that a single normal cup of coffee typically costs about $6. And I wouldn't be so bitter about that but for the fact that this cafe in particular attracted a stream of tourists, both foreign and Chinese, who wandered around taking pictures or sat down and ordered beverages and then took pictures of each other "enjoying a cafe in Shanghai" taking from the place a product rather than an experience.

I am not innocent of the fact that my assessment of this city has something to do with my own cultural preference for a certain authentic experience but that does little to dampen my disdain. Last Sunday afternoon I went for a long walk in Dan's neighborhood, telling him when I returned that "I just walked until I found China," meaning that I went searching for my image of China, not posh boutiques and Sephora but bright noisy chaos: people riding bikes with tiny dogs in their baskets and haggling over vegetables in their pajamas.

I'm also biased against this city for the simple fact that I've never believed that having lots of money is worthy of admiration in and of itself; I hold quite the opposite view. As Dan said over dinner last night, this city aspires to the lowest possible shared aspirations: wealth and status. There are surely exceptions hiding out somewhere: artists, intellectuals, and other trouble-makers, but the general feeling of the place, its present geist, is the desire for money and the things it can buy and so like all the other places dominated by consumer capitalism it feels hollowed out by the homogenizing power of perpetual want.

Of course there is plenty of wealth in my beloved Beijing but it is still relatively contained in certain parts of the city (ahem, Sanlitun). I'm always happiest roaming around the older parts of the city, the places that are human-scaled and bursting with life, and I worry about the hutongs being demolished not only because of my desire for a "real China" where everyone does Tai Chi and plays checkers on the sidewalks but because their disappearance will mark the total ascendance of the belief that if a place is not profitable it has no value.

Dan and I also prefer the Beijing expat community, full of students, journalists, and various do-gooders genuinely interested in the country and its culture; Shanghai expats have a reputation for enjoying the city precisely because many parts of it don't feel like China. It may feel so familiar to foreigners because so much of it was built by and for them. The history of 20th century Shanghai is fascinating but frequently ugly - the division and settling of the city by foreign powers in the treaty port era, the Japanese occupation, the persecution of Communists when it was a Nationalist stronghold... my glancing knowledge of that history was why I was so bowled over the first time I came here and was treated to views like this.

I still find those views stunning. Standing on the bank of the Huangpu river you can look to one side at the beautiful limestone buildings of The Bund, the site of foreign banks and hotels from the 20s and 30s, as well as clubs that infamously refused to admit Chinese nationals as members.

The Bund formed a celebrated 20th century cityscape and represented to a large extent European hopes for colonial expansion. But now it is dwarfed by the skyscrapers of Pudong across the river, ambitious, absurd, and all built over the last two decades on what was farmland 50 years ago. It's two kinds of hubris facing off and it's fantastic.

I am also an unabashed fan of all the other batshit crazy buildings and skyscrapers scattered across the city. It's not enough to make a building tall and shiny in Shanghai, you have to make it weird. Unfortunately you can't see most of the detail in this pictures, but trust me, it's worth the risk to walk around town with your eyes facing skyward.

This one (detail from above) is one of my favorites. Let Gandalf out of there Sauron!!!

And finally, here is proof that Shanghai has at least one feature of the "real China" I know and love: its residents will sleep anywhere, anytime. Bless.

SEAGULLS AND OTHER SIGNS OF RIGHTNESS

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

- T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets (Little Gidding)

Though I'm heading back to China in nine days and won't be settling down here in Seattle until November this return already feels different. It's never mattered how long I've been away -- the beauty here has always astonished me -- but this time I feel it more deeply. My skin and bones seem to have their own memory of home: the angle of the light at this familiar latitude, the cool mornings and long sunsets, trees tall or stout with leaves coarse or pliant whose names I never learned but to whom something in me turns in happy recognition.

It feels like all of the accumulated wrongnesses of the past few months, all those times I felt hounded by unnameable anxieties and fears (rather like what Holly Golightly so memorably referred to as the mean reds) that only multiplied as I reflected on the oppressive heat, the smallness of a small town, my own considerable limitations as a scholar and a human being; it seems those wrongnesses melt away in the face of mountains and water or when a seagull squawks overhead and I think yes! this is right! there should be seagulls flying overhead! that's what was missing!

Of course it's not just seagulls that I've needed. I've needed my friends close, close enough that we can take for granted mundane moments together, without the pressure of squeezing a year of triumphs and catastrophes, lessons and mistakes, old memories and new dreams, into a few hours of "catching up". I've needed to stop living out of suitcases and learning new kitchens (at least for awhile) and not be forever planning the next move. And most recently, I've needed to accept that trying to write one's dissertation can make you entirely too aware of your own shortcomings but that is no excuse for not getting the mother done. I've needed to accept that if most people were confronted with the prospect of writing something worthy of ~6 years of intellectual labor, capable of meeting the expectations of a respected council of academic elders, and completed on self-determined schedules and deadlines, than most people too would wake semi-optimistically then watch the day dissolve into errands, e-mail, and endless tiny projects, and give way to a night of angry self-recriminations, nameless fears, and troubled dreams.

By which I mean to say I think I've realized that my slow progress at writing does not indicate moral turpitude, but merely shows that I, like most people, need structure and support to face this beastly challenge. And that's a nice mental vista to make a fresh start with as I enjoy the view from home.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo to you all. 十一月见！

HAVE BOOT, WILL TRAVEL

A few months back the lovely people at Fulbright invited me and a few other alumni to share our experiences as grantees with the incomings at their orientation in DC and I accepted with pleasure. The ego-stroking was not the only perk; I also got a free flight to the east coast, where I had already intended to travel this summer, and lodging at the Grand Hyatt, mere blocks from the White House and home of one of the biggest flags I've ever seen.

Once again my room faced inward, with a view of not only the rooms across the atrium, but the magical lagoon on the mezzanine (the little island at the top of the lagoon is a piano, and though I never saw a pianist there I truly hope he wears flippers and swims to and from each performance).

The orientation was great fun. We presented on living and researching in China to the whole cohort then broke into smaller groups with students matched to our regional and academic areas and fielded their many questions. They fed us wonderful food and at every mealtime we had opportunities to meet more of the bright and enthusiastic young scholars. It was a great pleasure to be surrounded by people I share a passion with and to feel as if I was helping them to have a better Fulbright experience: to engage more deeply with their communities and carry out successful research.

In the evenings I met up with a few of my Beijing friends who now have jobs in interesting places in DC, going one night to an awesome bar called Church & State, with a stained glass window, a built in confessional adjoining a private room, and a menu fit for the most discerning nationalistic boozehound:

This is not a church

DC is not a state

But every bottle here, whether heavenly or devilish, comes from the United States, its territories, or its possessions.

We invite you to be free and brave.

I had a mint julep and a Rooster (tomato vodka, vermouth, orange liqueur, basil syrup, lime juice, and sriracha) and very nearly had another when we had to wait to leave because there had been a stabbing in the club downstairs. Yes, DC is truly an American town.

I also spent heaps of time booting it up in the museums with friends. The National Portrait Gallery was only a few blocks from the hotel and had a beautiful exhibit of Alexander Calder's sculptural wire portraits (as I left agog one of the guards told me the pieces had a similar effect on most visitors) and this piece by the Korean-American artist Nam June Paik, Electronic Superhighway.

The piece was inspired by the artist's first few years in the U.S. in the 60s, when the interstates (and television) were still new and provided an intoxicating way to try to apprehend the enormity of this country. Each state had its own looping videos, and the more cliche the better (Indiana was footage from the Indy 500, Kansas was The Wizard of Oz), as they communicated how difficult it is for even a natural born citizen, let alone an immigrant, to have anything approaching a sophisticated conception of all our 50 states given the limitations of our time, attention span, and reptilian brains.

I loved the piece so much I sought out Paik's exhibit at the National Gallery but I didn't like it nearly as much. Still there was much to love: the I. M. Pei designed East Wing, the sculpture garden, this Magritte:

and a whole room of Russian Constructivism (I think this one is Rodchenko)

I stayed another 2 nights in DC after the orientation, hosted by my dear friend Aaron, and on my final day we went shopping for supplies at the 亚洲超市 in Rockville so I could add a 5th city to the list of places I've cooked Chinese dinners since being back from Beijing in December. My comrades, all of whom have eaten many meals in China, dutifully gobbled down the dishes and I was proud as a peacock to have stuffed them silly.

I didn't see half as many folks as I'd planned to in NYC, but I had known in advance that my usual habit of walking around Manhattan for hours wouldn't suit the boot, and it turned out Marybeth and her tornado of a toddler Avery didn't mind me hanging around their Sunnyside apartment in the least.

Resident pug/Yoda-lookalike Bruce also seemed pleased with my company. Did you know that pugs were once bred as bedwarmers for European royalty? I'll be requesting a team of them the next time I try to endure a Northern Chinese winter.

We took the dog and the tot to the park, where regretfully, I did not buy an ice cream.

And we took the train out to Flushing to explore a Chinatown more like contemporary China than any I've ever visited. They had delicious food (Marybeth boldly ordered 八宝冰, a sort of sweet bean sno cone and I snarfed a red bean sesame ball) and wonderful crap, featuring Grade-A engrish:

And inexplicably animal-festooned household goods.

On my final day I had a brunch at Popover with a beautiful actress and walked to the Whitney to meet Marybeth and Avery. We had high hopes for a video artist by the name of Cory Arcangel, said to be inspired by Christian Marclay, but I was much more taken by the gorgeous retrospective of Bauhaus painter Lionel Feininger who lovingly rendered social grotesques in vibrant colors. I irresponsibly ponied up for the exhibition book and didn't regret it afterwards for a second.

Of course then we had to go lie in Central Park, where I admired the turtles on the banks of Turtle Pond stretching their necks towards the sun,

The flowers in the Shakespeare Garden,

And all those small lovely details one comes across ambulating through that great park.

Avery enjoyed himself as well.

Marybeth took my picture with the boot, which I have since been freed of. I'm sure I'll feel tremendously nostalgic looking at this in a few years.

The last item on the agenda was a visit to what a friend in DC had told me was a large room in an office building in Soho filled with nothing but dirt. Some research revealed it to be "The New York Earth Room", an installation by Walter De Maria that has been on display since 1980 and with the very same docent/security guard/keeper for most of that time (it was in fact he that I was told by the friend I had to meet).

I arrived just one minute past the closing time but I didn't much mind not actually getting in to see it. Thinking as much as I do about economics and culture and value (too much? no, not enough!) it did my soul good to know that somewhere in Manhattan is an office full of dirt, a space of no productivity but what creeps up from the soil (to be removed by the diligent keeper). I'll go next time, to be certain, but I've taken a certain sustenance from it already. Lovely art, spectacular friends, intellectual engagement. It was a nourishing trip indeed.