Travel Journal: China
Do you understand?
“Ting de dong?” the woman asks as she pulls herself through the doorframe. She is tall, stately, has hair that halos her head like a smoke cloud and skin that's taut like a freshly-tanned hide. She looks me straight in the eyes, and suddenly I am reminded of a time I once encountered a garden snake warily coiled inside a chicken coop, its form bulging with three distinct ovular lumps.
“A little,” I reply, instantly reminded of my heavy accent.
“Good,” she says. She doesn’t smile. They hardly ever smile. “Where are you from?”
“America,” I say, hesitating. The words literally mean “beautiful country.” I wait to see if a flinch of distaste flashes in her eyes -- whether I instantly become a bomb-dropping cowboy, a Hollywood movie star, or a trade pirate with ren min bi flowing through my fingers like granules of sand. But all I find is an unwavering candor that forces me to attention.
“Tourist?”
“Student,” I say. That word means something here.
“Ah, good,” she says. “Would you like me to tell you about this place?”
“Yes,” I say, and without warning a stream of words begins to pour out of her mouth like silk from the worm. What I can make out of it is the sad story of the writer who once lived in the series of small rooms surrounding the tree-lined courtyard the two of us stand in. He was in school here, she says, in Beijing. He was training to be a doctor, but he wanted to write. He was married to a woman from his hometown. They were not in love. He was tied here by respect for his family. He would write at the desk in the room to your left by lamplight in the evening. She points. It’s right there.
I stand in rapt attention as she continues her tale and, for that time, there is no greater shame in my heart than the fact that I can only make out a quarter of the meaning that lies behind the smooth flow of tonal shifts and guttural stops that issue from her lips. A group of Chinese college students, shimmering with focus unmarred by binge drinking and Facebook, files in through the door behind my back. She beckons them over with curling fingers attached to a downward-facing palm.
“Please join in,” she says. “This is an American student.”
They all glance over me briefly, slightly curious. It’s still not common, Americans in the city, but they’re young and urban. They’re hard to impress.
“Ting de dong,” she says, pointing at me. Hearing this, they take a second, more thorough look, and I have the distinct feeling they see something in me that isn’t there at all.
What struck me first about Beijing, besides the sky scorched a near-constant dark gray by air pollution that would later make several of my classmates cough up black goo, was the breakneck pace of the city: the skyscrapers that seemed to be constructing themselves overnight, the startlingly efficient subway system, and the feet of workers on foot, bicycle pedal and (for the wealthy) car accelerator.
This was no Oriental paradise filled with plum blossom courtyards and tiny-footed women or a post-communism wasteland of cabbage soup, inescapable misery, and political repression. This was a country. A country where mysterious, wild-haired Caucasian women dotted billboards and merchandise packaging like geishas on Arizona iced tea bottles and teenagers sported T-shirts featuring Homer Simpson, the NBA and Avril Lavigne. A country where so much hard, steady work was accomplished that I often wondered where they kept the invisible meat grinders the inefficient must have been tossed into. This was a country that was pulling every stop it could to obtain the place it desired in the world.
Two months earlier and 20 miles away from the famous author’s home, I stand face to face with another woman. She is average height, with a face as stung as a paper cut and a black stocking cap pulled low on her brow. Her blatant features bloom out of a crowd that springs up around me as I try to complete an assignment for my language class (go to a local park and ask an elderly person about their daily life) and I wonder what put that bitter glisten in her eyes. Years of hard labor? Husband sent to a prison camp in the Cultural Revolution? Sister starved to death during the Great Leap forward? The elderly people hover like flies around the sheer curiosity at the tall, round-eyed American girl trying to speak their language.
“Ting de dong?” asks her voice, crisp and direct through the ever-present bustle and hum. I nod.
“Really?” she says in crystal clear English. I nearly jump from surprise. “Where are you from? The States?”
“Yes,” I say back to her in Mandarin. She nods warily. She sees my homework sheet grasped in my hand, its form covered with hastily-scribbled characters.
“You can write?”
I nod. The others in the crowd, hearing her, all react with astonishment, almost honor. An American, I hear them think, trying to learn our language.
“That’s very good,” she says, still in English, half to me and half to the crowd that can’t understand her. “Usually they can talk, but not write. You must be a very good student.”
I don’t know how to tell her or anyone else that my three years of sometimes-serious study of her language don’t compare to the kind of work Chinese students have to do to make the same trip over the Pacific that I have. My parents paid for me to come here, I want to say. I didn’t really earn it. But, just then, the claps of a severe-faced woman in charge of a ballroom dancing class in a nearby courtyard come echoing into my ears.
“Yi, er, san, si,” she yells. “One, two, three, four. Keep up the pace.”
When I turn back around, the woman with all the pain bottled up beneath her features is gone, swept away in an arm of the ever-present crowd of people that filled every street, alleyway and subway car I ever came across. I never figure out who this woman is. I don’t forget her face.
Back at the museum, the statuesque woman has finished her tale and directed us all onwards to other venues. I head next door to a boxy, postmodern museum complex. The lobby is decorated with a series of Modernist ink-block prints that look like they’re straight out of the Holocaust: men and women, their bodies writhing in pain, their faces contorted into primal screams.
I see pictures. The writer as a baby in his mother’s arms, the family garbed in traditional robes. The solemn-faced young man in a class portrait amid jars full of formaldehyde and wire-strung skeletons. The second wife, with her hair cut short like a little boy’s and her eyes serious and wet like a freshly shucked oyster. His writer’s circle in 1927: 15 members. A Chinese man on his knees, hands tied, sack pulled firmly around his face, a sword-wielding Japanese soldier poised to sweep his blade downward. The writer’s circle in 1937: 8 members. The intense-eyed old man.
These images stick to the inside of my head as I make my two-mile trek back to my dorm room. In the streets, it’s hard not to notice the look of determination, hardship, and nearly-pervasive optimism on their faces. It’s not the look I expected to find when I planned my trip. And I have to wonder if underneath all that, the memory of what the people of this country have been through lingers silently under the surface, in the dark recesses of peoples’ minds. Regardless, it was impossible not to see the Big, Bright Future illuminating the tired faces of workers and professionals alike. “A New China,” were the words emblazoned on the cover of my textbook. A land of growth and opportunity. A country with a future. A future like America.
When I get back to the dorm room, I stop by the room across the hall to see if my best Chinese friend, Li Shu Jia, would be interested in going out to eat. She is a Chinese college student on summer break who volunteered to help integrate the Americans in my program. Earlier in the summer, she thoroughly impressed and frightened me when she revealed that she only got one full week of vacation. The rest of her two-month break would be spent studying for the rigorous graduate school entrance examination she would be taking the following January. Perhaps 2 percent of the Chinese population has degrees past high school, and of these, only a fraction get into the best universities in the nation’s capital. These students’ dedication to study, I have noticed, makes American students’ “education” look like a joke. Li Shu Jia is a tough cookie.
Since she has helped me out on numerous occasions by staying up late to help me finish written assignments and teaching me how to haggle in the enormous complex of wholesale vendor stalls down the street, I think it would be nice to treat my friend. She doesn’t turn me down. Later that night, we head through the still-busy streets of evening Beijing.
Though the sun has set, I never feel at particular risk in the city. Pickpockets remain a problem, but the ownership of a firearm is punishable by death. Violent crimes are rare. As we cross an “air bridge,” an elevated sidewalk across a six-lane highway lit up with red and white lights, Li Shu Jia confides in me her desire to own an AK-47-like gun (she mimes for me, two fists clenched at the end of her broomstick-thin forearms and body rhythmically jerking from the discharge of the shells) so she could kill trespassers on her parents’ farm in Outer Mongolia. I give her a horrified look and explain to her why I think this is not a good idea, but she doesn’t seem to believe me. Then we have arrived.
Our choice of venues is the closest of the 50 plus McDonald’s that are showcased like oases on the tourist map I was given as part of orientation. It’s once in a blue moon that I dine under the golden arches in the U.S., but here it takes on a different context. This is mid-range dining, still somewhat exotic. A cross-cultural experience. After surprising the cashier by waving away the comically large picture menu designed for foreigners, I order my Big Mac with a Coke, a side of boiled corn, and a pineapple sundae and head up to the second story of the establishment to take a seat. An eerie chill runs through me as I notice the gargantuan, triangle-bearded form of Colonel Sanders’ head staring at the two of us from across the street. We begin to talk.
I try to be as honest with Li Shu Jia as I hope she is with me. She is a history major, so we start with Queen Elizabeth, and move on to women’s rights, the Gold Rush (the only thing she knows about Chinese immigrants in the United States), our families, politics, our futures.
“Do Americans really have more freedom than us?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say. “We do. But people don’t know how to use them. We are spoiled.”
She gives me a look of profound disappointment.
“Be careful,” I say. “What you do. This country is developing very quickly. But there are problems with development. It’s not all good.”
Her eyebrows raise in skepticism.
“I think making money is a good thing. I think being poor is very bad,” she says.
I nod.
“In America, we don’t know each other. People don’t care about one another. We’re lazy. Our power won’t last,” I say.
For some reason, I feel like my country deserves the fate I’ve just doled out. Maybe it will save us.
“Americans seem to spend tomorrow’s dollar today,” she says. “Ting de dong?”
I don’t say anything.
