I wake up Friday morning to my the-nuclear-reactor-has-been-breached-on-the-submarine klaxon alarm and scramble to cram in a few final characters before my test. My mind feels like a scrambled egg from all the studying last night, and my thoughts are sparse like a lobotomized insomniac. Still, I squeeze the characters into my brain like a final shirt in a bulging suitcase and go take my test, but not before first taking a shower.
The steam swirls and escapes through the open window, the noise of a Beijing morning fills the void. Car horns, bike bells, sirens, the jackhammer on a sidewalk bambambambambambam, steel beams clanging as a building is constructed, more of that kid from the Flintstones BAMBAMBAMBAMBAM drilling into my head to migraine depth; noise; noise like a city under attack or a mind besieged, the morning announcements and music from the college loudspeakers, the ding of the microwave in the next room, another classmate’s submarine klaxon alarm. It’s enough to drive a quiet country boy like myself insane. Before coming to Beijing in high school I’d heard friends argue that it wasn’t city noise but a kind of music, the pulse and tempo of a place. I say that if this is music, it’s musical barbarism. The music roars twenty hours a day morning day and night and there’s nowhere to hide; not in the bathroom or under the covers or in a park. Everywhere I go is within range of the music’s terror. This ‘music’ is like the bay of hounds chasing a convict, and like the convict I know that if I don’t escape it I’ll be trapped forever.
I step out of the shower and think of a line from The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, “Abroad, she discovered that the transformation of music into noise was a planetary process by which mankind was entering the historical phase of ugliness.” The noise drowns out words, but our words are often nothing but another form of the ugly music. Grasping for the right one but never being precise enough, the words are obliterated of meaning like the pleas of help from the boy who cried wolf, they turn into trash that fills our minds and mouth and clouds our ability to think. The noise is an unholy terror perpetrated by the modern age. When did we last do or listen instead of talking about nothing? How can there be 700 channels of talking and it all have meaning? We have created this ugliness, and like Frankenstein’s monster no longer know how to control it.
Where are the angry villagers? Or have we lost the ability to truly be angry in the noise as well?
These are the thoughts on my mind after my test as I pack my backpack for my two week trip to Xinjiang along the Silk Road. It’s a chance to escape Beijing, but will I escape the abominable music as well? What will I learn in the emptiness of the grasslands and desert?
I get off the bus outside Beijing West Train Station and have two people come up and ask if I’m looking for a hotel. No, I say with a sigh of relief, I’m leaving, not arriving.
Inside my ticket is punched and I’m waved through to the train, and so begins my two week hegira. I find my bunk and settle in for the long ride, book in hand. The train’s abstergent celerity whisks us out from beneath Beijing’s grey smog. I’m Frodo looking at the darkness around Mount Doom, but I’m going the wrong way to be Frodo, so I’m just me.
Our tickets are not all together, and as most of my classmates nap or crowd in a nearby car, I sit by the window and allow my thoughts to wonder. The Chinese passengers around me do the same. Only the noise of the ventose safety announcements and occasional cough punctuate the silence.
After a while I glance down at the book in my hand and consider reading it, but decide to read something more interesting instead. I read the landscape, and as such, history, through the window. China from east to west can be divided into a first, second, and third world country. I watch and read history made and history being made, watch the ruins of buildings be absorbed in the construction dust of a skyscraper. Everywhere there are construction cranes, China’s unofficial national bird. There’s a pollution smudge halfway up the window that sometimes gets in the way and sometimes disappears entirely. The farms and hills and dirty stations and roads…rocks…trees…cars…they blur together like a giant run-on sentence, the cities commas and towns periods, each stop a new paragraph but rarely a new chapter. I think of Chinese grammar and my translation class and how a Chinese sentence in any other language is a run-on. Punctuation was not one of the four great inventions, or so the joke goes. I look at my book, a political science report on the South China Sea in Chinese for confirmation of this. I look back out the window at the long sentence of wheat blurring by, and wonder if this is all somehow related.
That’s too much heavy thinking for one day, and I put my unread book away and go find my classmates. We tell stories and they play word association games until the lights go out, and we all laugh; I’m thankful that the Chinese around us don’t speak English.
The next morning we get off the train in Xi-An (西安), an ancient Chinese capital and the location of the famed Terra-Cotta Warriors. Our tour guide, a jolly local who always speaks in the third person, meets us with our bus. “I’m Beni,” he says. “Benjamin Franklin for short.” Over the next two days we all become accustomed to cries of “Follow Beni!” and the short raised tour group flag held aloft.
We were supposed to bike around the old city wall, but anti-Japanese protests prevent it and we spend most of the day exploring the city on our own. I’m disappointed, but only briefly. I’d planned for weeks to bike around the city wall singing a Queen song, but in lieu of that cultural exchange opportunity I get a better one in the form of the protests. We’re told to stay away, but what the teachers really mean is go, just don’t sue us because we’ve now said not to. It’s an amazing experience, and frightening. I don’t know what the Cultural Revolution sounded like, but the noise of thousands of angry shouts and raised fists against Japan and foreigners is enough to make my hair stand on end. The flags and banners stream past. A soda machine and some chairs are tossed through a third floor window, raining sharp shards of glass on onlookers below. Store fronts are vandalized, and every shop in town is putting up as many Chinese flags and “The Diaoyu Islands are China’s” banners as they can to avoid a similar fate. I creep vertiginously close and realize the protest is fast becoming a mob. There is no leader to tell them where to march next, and a Honda is flipped. One of my blonde classmates has rocks thrown at her. Curses are shot at them, and I’m thankful for my long experience in China and ability to blend with a crowd. It’s fast becoming chaos, and I get out of there.
Beni tells me that Japanese are dirty thieves and that he only has one Japanese friend, then redeems himself by explaining that the friend is actually American and just of Japanese descent.
The extreme anti-Japanese sentiment in China and racism is a product of changes in the education system and text books after Tiananmen Square when the government sough to direct negative energy outward, and though the government has backed off pushing the anti-Japanese message, it’s become a pet alligator that now bites them in the ass.
I’m all for patriotism, but this is too much. We only do this in America when a Detroit or LA sports team wins the national championship, and that’s in celebration, not hatred directed at foreigners. For the next few hours I and my classmates stay in our hotel, chants of “Down With Little Japan!” shaking the city. I remember I once had dinner with a guy in Beijing who told me he loved Americans because we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. What madness a mob mentality creates!
That night when we go out for dinner, there are thousands of stern-faced riot cops about, shields and all. A light drizzle adds to the mood. I’ve never felt a more tense environment in all my time in China.
A police tow-truck arrives to take away one of the flipped Hondas or Toyotas. It’s a Japanese made tow-truck. The irony is too much, and I go to sleep laughing.
The next day we visit a mosque and the terra-cotta warriors, where there is a notable absence of Japanese and even Korean tour groups. We all “Follow Beni!” through the different stops. I ask my teachers why a tyrannical emperor who enslaved 750,000 people to build him an army of pots is celebrated as a hero in a socialist country run by a communist party. It’s an impressive achievement, but does ignoring all the evil Qinshihuang did for the little bit of good not set a bad precedent? They have no response and we all think of Mao, but say nothing.
It’s another train and I’m in Gansu province. We spend a few days in Xiahe visiting various Buddhist monasteries, including famed Labrang Monastery, one of the three major sites for Tibetan Buddhism in China. We hike around the area and enjoy the grasslands. Horses are ridden, photos with monks taken, yak butter milk-tea consumed.
On the second night in Xiahe I go with a few classmates to find a restaurant with local food and we stumble into a true China experience. The menu is in Chinese and Tibetan, but the proprietor speaks only a few words of Mandarin and we speak only a few of Tibetan. We read the Mandarin and point at the Tibetan to order, but he can’t read Tibetan either, so he goes next door to find a monk who can tell him what it says, then comes back and tells us if he has it available or not. It’s made his day that we’re here, and it’s making ours as well. We’re not even ordering amounts now, just letting him decide. His wife shows us how to make the dumplings. He brings out napkins to wipe out our dusty glasses with, then brings the beer. A drink to cut the dust takes on a new meaning for me. We are stuffed with yak dumplings, and the man turns on a old television set to a dubbed show about the Chinese heroically resisting and killing the Japanese during WWII. He listens to the dubbed Tibetan as we read the Chinese subtitles. There are dozens of shows like this on TV, and if one had an ounce of truth to it then the Japanese would have lost millions during the war to such gorilla actions. I’ve never seen such fantasy in a TV show before, but it’s still good fun so we stay and watch. We drink more beer together, and accept the cigarettes offered to us. We laugh and try to chat as best we can. More dumplings are made. We sit around doing this until well past midnight, drinking the stale beer and smoking the cigarettes, then the cigarette butts from the ashtrays because all the stores have closed. None of us smoke, but this is a true China experience. You don’t turn something like this down, and we don’t. We all go to bed that night in a food coma, our stomachs bursting with delicious yak dumplings.
The next morning we follow the trail of the thousands of prayer wheels around Labrang monastery. The air smells of incense, grass, and dust churned by the rounds of the faithful. It’s a statement on the effects of capitalism, technology, and science that even here only the old and the monks turn the prayer wheels. Everyone else is either too distracted, overly educated and blinded by too much knowledge, or too busy making money. Europe’s great cathedrals are empty of all but tourists, and this place may soon follow suit.
On our final day in Xiahe we ride out to a nearby monastery that is truly out in the country. It belongs to a difference sect than the Tibetan monasteries of the previous few days. The shamanistic religion of the area has been incorporated into Buddhism, or vice-versa. Prayer wheels here are turned the opposite direction and flags with swastikas flutter in the wind. This monastery’s pace of life is much slower than the other, as is the small town around it. The lone tractor in the fields putters by, the birds glide in lazy circles on the wind, and even the flies around the toilets buzz without purpose.
We hike up to a ridge overlooking the grasslands for lunch, but I’m not feeling that great and head down early for the nearest outdoor squatter, where I find myself squatting over a foul-smelling latrine just inches from the head lama of the temple. In a strange way, it’s reassuring to know that the local food has the same effect on the old man as it does my weak western stomach. I take some Chinese stomach meds and pray they work, my thoughts on the trip back to our hotel. I can’t imagine much that’s worse than being just liquid on a bus ride across that flat grassland, with naught even a bush to squat behind.
Luckily I better, and we’re supposed to play some of the monks in a basketball game in a bit. The others aren’t down from lunch yet, so I wander about, taking in the atmosphere. The tired groan and squeak of the prayer wheels fills the air. Sometimes the wind turns them, as if the mountains themselves are offering up a prayer. From a nearby temple comes the baritone diapason of chanting.
I look out at the beautiful scenery around me, nearly untouched by man. If asked, I would say the raw spirituality of these monasteries and mosques comes from the place, from the trees and mountains, not the temples. Even the monks seem to recognize this, having built everything in seclusion from the abhorrent music of the world so that they can better commune with the eternal. It’s a commonality between all religions, that connection.
The chanting stops. Whereas the omnipresent, disharmonious racket of modern life smothers any sensation of a soul, here the sound of silence is thick with it. Is there a cure for the phthisis zeitgeist of city life? I think there is, and here is a reminder of it.
The game begins and I’m feeling better so I join in. The monks can really move in their robes and sandals. There’s not much to do out here for fun, and they’re very good. Still, it’s difficult for them to box out and rebound when their opponent has six inches on every player.
We go elsewhere in Gansu and see more yaks and grasslands. We see the Thousand Buddha Caves, also known as the Mogao grottos, in Dunhuang, where I get to see a nine story Buddha statue. We ride camels in the sand dunes and pretend we’re on the old Silk Road. Some complain about the heat and soreness, but I love it. We also ride bikes out into the country and help a family pick cotton, which allowed me a redemptive chance after the canceled ride in Xi-An, so I sing “Bicycle Race” with my friends and enjoy the perfect fall day.
We finally get to Turpan, in Xinjiang, and go visit Jiaohe Ancient City. Our guide for Xinjiang greets us at the train station and begins by telling us that the Uigher are the dominant ethnic group in Xinjiang, and that they have beautiful faces because they have blue eyes but that sometimes their minds have problems because they think of things like “freedom” and “independence.”
*Sigh*
China.
We stop at a traditional Uigher home and feast on the sweetest grapes anywhere in the world, then off for a steep hike and a long bus ride to Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. The Uighers look Turkic and Eastern European. For a week and a half we’ve journeyed by train and bus into Central Asia, snaking through hidden combes with mountains a foot from each window and then breaking free and speeding across places so flat and empty you wonder if God got distracted and forgot to finish it. This is a hilly place, this is a mountain range, a river valley, a desert, big sky country, grasslands and more desert. During the ride a car flying a giant Chinese flag and a “Down with Japan” banner passes us. It’s a Toyota. Out of the desert appears a city, and finally we’ve arrived. We’re in Urumqi. I go to sleep excited for the coming days.
We go to the Xinjiang Art College and listen to an amazing performance by traditional instruments and then go to a dance class, where we ‘learn’ a dance and then scar the students forever with bad club music, but it’s okay because they join in and soon it’s just a big dance party.
That night we go to KTV and stay out far too late, so when the next morning rolls around we all get on the bus to go hike a mountain hungover and running on just a few hours sleep. Even the tour guide is in the same boat as us, but the clean mountain air and exercise quickly gets us all on our feet again. I see two guys on a motorcycle herding a dozen horses down the road and wonder what time warp I’ve entered.
It’s a beautiful view from the top of the mountain, and well worth the hike. It was a tough slog though, and not everyone makes it to the top. I was spurred on by my friend playing Lord Of The Rings soundtrack music.
We eat at the top, looking out across a beautiful valley at snow-capped mountains and reflecting on Xinjiang. It’s so different here. Yes, Urumqi is a city, but it’s different because of the Uighur influence.
The thought strikes me with such clarity I’m shocked: This isn’t China. Now I’m not denying that China rules Xinjiang politically, but whereas other border regions have been absorbed by Han culture, like Yunnan, here the reverse has taken place. The Uighers adopted a few things from the Han, but for the most part have stayed the same. They are their own people and have seen political control over this region change hands for millennia. It’s a bit of the wild west out here, and as long as they are left alone they won’t be trouble because they know how history works. It’s quite a contrast between these people and the people back in Beijing. Both are happy with their lives, but the Uighers seem to understand life… I don’t know, better.
Why the difference? My guess is that it has to do with the geography and culture. Phone beeps, sirens, and vendor squawks fill the city day, and city nights are populated with headlights and car horns, both in Urumqi and in Beijing. But the people here in Urumqi can get out and escape the chaos, and often do; they have a cultural precedent that hasn’t been gobbled up by the postmodern life yet; family and tradition is still important and stands strong as the bedrock of life. Beijing, however, is like any other city, and each city is just a fresh take on the biblical Babel: nothing but a desperate and loud shriek into the void of space and time, desperate to let our brief existence be known even as we make more noise to hide the possible absence of an echo, lest we realize there is nothing and we are nothing more than finite anomalies in an infinite universe of infinite universes. Yet here in Xinjiang, there is no competition to build the tallest building; other parts of life take precedence. The timeless and things that last are deemed more important than they are in Beijing.
Sitting on the mountain, we shout to hear our echoes, and though the trees and snow absorb our shouts, in Xinjiang the void does return an echo: The whistling of wind over the sand, the twinkle of a thousand thousand stars from the blackness, the awareness of that fragment of the eternal in us all. Here, on this trip, there is more than just a whispered response from the void. Here there is a deafening answer, and in the emptiest of places when we realize how alone and isolated we are, we realize that much of that sense of isolation is self-imposed by walking down the street all trapped in our own digital sphere of friends and tweets and texts, ignorant of the person beside us. This is what Xinjiang reminds us, that we are never truly alone.
That night we all go to a street with lots of snack food and feast on traditional Uigher cooking. The lamb intestines are amazing, and we eat so many chuanr 串儿, a kind of meat kebab, that we probably take responsibility for slaughtering an entire flock of sheep.
The next day we go to the Grand Bazaar where we are quickly and expertly divulged of our money, and then have free time that afternoon. I go to the museum to see some really old mummies whose lineage clearly comes from west of here, but the PRC won’t allow testing on them because it might harm China’s claim to Xinjiang. The museum is cool, but it prevaricates an official story that brushes over the rich complexity of Xinjiang’s history, which is a shame.
I go out for more kebabs that night and find a PBR in the Muslim district of a city in Central Asia. I have to buy it and do, along with lots of Snickers for the long train ride back to Beijing. We board the next morning at ten and won’t get off until eight at night a day later; thirty-eight hours on a train is not my favorite part of this trip, but I manage. I read my book and frequently get my zen on by staring mindlessly out the window at a desert forested by power and telephone lines and wind turbines.
The next morning I wake up to blaring music from the intercom and settle in for another full day on the train. Out the window I notice an ignominious, dusty little town that trains race past every hour, but I wonder how many have ever really seen it. Traveling by train is a less sceptic experience than flying, but you still can’t detour like you can with a car or walk and discover as I did over spring break in Yunnan when hitching. The “It’s not the destination but the journey” crowd better not be flying, otherwise they’re hypocrites.
Then again, maybe I’m just tired and jealous of anyone who flew and avoided the hell of another long train ride. It’s an experience everyone should have if only to learn patience, but I’ve had enough of it. I can’t wait to get back to Beijing and take a shower.
But is it really Beijing that I miss? Beijing, with it’s endless millions and sardine can subways and people bustling about, always looking to make a few kuai with Mao’s stern visage on it. They do, too, but the kuai moved from the baker to the beer vendor and back all week until given as change on a Friday night to the college student who spends it across town, and that’s how the city works. Motion, everyone going, going somewhere else, constant motion but still always here, here in the dust and smog and chaos, here grabbing taking stealing hustling giving leaving sighing going coming crying laughing whining celebrating eating farting drinking stumbling cursing drunkenly doing it all again sleeping repeating and finally dying, and even then the motion doesn’t stop doesn’t rest doesn’t pause or even take notice. That battery of production is used up, insert a replacement in his seat and keep moving, just don’t stop. You’re in a city of twenty million and you’ve never had less privacy yet never been more alone.
No, it’s the shower I want, not Beijing. The music there is ubiquitous, it’s soul-deafening noise pervasive and pernicious like an ugly rumor. It’s enough to drive a man mad with envy or heavy with despair or so happy he or her or they (but never you or I) can’t stand it, and the difference is no more than a few digital zeroes on a corrupt bank account.
Yet, I am happy to return to Beijing. I enjoy walking amongst the quiet hutongs, playing chinese chess with old men in the park, going for a leisurely afternoon stroll along Xihai lake, hot honey lemon tea in hand, watching the retirees rib each other as they fish. I love Beijing; I can’t stand it at times. It’s fun; it’s too crazy. It’s Chinese; it’s international. It’s a sprawling city; it’s a close-knit community.
We can’t all live in solitude amongst the mountains, some of us have to descend into the chaos to progress the world for the next generation. The important thing, I think, is that we not forget about those mountains, that we not get too caught up in the rat race and remember what is really important in life. That’s what the Uighers in Xinjiang taught me.
Psychiatry is always coming up with new compounds to combat new complexes, yet the number of complexes and of those who are complexed ceaselessly increases. Perhaps the absence of purity that spawns complexes can be traced to the loss of the simple. I love Beijing, but I love getting away from it even more. In my two weeks on the Silk Road I got to experience the best of both worlds. Now that I’m firmly back in one, I can’t help but think of the other, even as I realize that for now, my place is here. My time and place back in the mountains close to the eternal has not yet arrived, so I sit down and study my characters, go out for a pint with friends, and fight for a cab during a rush hour that lasts for three.
Yet much like young Jim Hawkins, I always keep a weather-eye open for a chance to return, to escape, for a chance at another adventure.
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Kunming, China |
