(another tale from last year's trip to China, which begins with the entry "Ni Hao, Beijing.")
[Things get a little jumbled here, with stories jumping around as I wrote down current happenings on the same page as I recalled things I wanted to be sure to remember. Because I’m not a stickler for continuity, and I know you’re not either, I’ll just enter things the way they’re written in my notebook. Think of it as keeping the narrative pure. You’ll still see my ex post facto commentary, though. Never let it be said that I’m too pure.]
21 May, 2001: There is a juxtaposition here of wealth and poverty that seems distinct from what exists in the States. The billboards and flashy clothes and technology exist side-by-side with the crumbling brick and stone rubble that appears everywhere right next to the road. It looks like a destroyed city, and I think of the crumbling barns on the fringes of Iowa fams, until I see wash hanging or a line, or a basin and shoes by the door, and the realization hits that this is a village, a place where people live.
It seems like it might be a movie or a postcard but it is not—it is the real life of hundreds of thousands of people, not at all like the existence of the shoppers at Louis Vuitton and Prada in the basement of the China World Trade Center. Men shuffle along sidewalks paved with crumbling brick, their feet, below rolled pant legs, clad in black cloth slippers. Toddlers are alone with their parents—one child only—and doted upon accordingly.
On our way out to the Great Wall we passed what looked like a giant castle in the middle of an otherwise undeveloped area; our tour guide told us that it was the remnants of a theme park for children. The front wall and gate and some of the buildings were already constructed when China instituted its one-child policy [1978?] and the builders realized that they would be unlikely to draw many visitors from the sparse new generation, so they stopped production. Presumably it would have cost too much to tear everything down, so girders and scaffolding and brightly painted turrets all remain standing.
But still it is impossible to get a handle on what the everyday life of a Chinese citizen is like. Sellers use bullhorns to entice people into their shops. Bus drivers wear white gloves, and so do some fine-looking ladies as they ride their bicycles down the street. Some of these ladies wear large picture hats. The people we pass on the street are neatly, even fashionably, dressed, but the apartment buildings we pass are decrepit and aged-looking, with tattered curtains hanging from the windows. The vendors in the markets who grasp your arm to keep you from leaving their stall, from losing your ¥15—what do they do when they go home at night? What does that $1.75 do for them?
When our cushioned and air-conditioned bus passes dust-encrusted trucks filled with workers, what are the men thinking as they crouch in the truckbed with their hands clasping their knees? All of this is so far removed from [the Bay Area, California]—it renders meaningless all the previous pages in this book [the everyday annoyances that one records in a journal].
While our bus idles in traffic, I look out the window but try to avoid meeting people’s eyes. People are carrying home groceries in their bags or bicycle baskets for the evening meal; children are toddling around in their split pants; everyone is eating ice cream bars. Everyone is very slim and moves comfortably. Even at the Forbidden City, we were surprised to see very elderly people climbing the very steep stairs to the observation pagoda. There were many steps and we wheezed, but the elderly men and women made the climb all the same. Compare this to how X’s grandparents refused to join his mother at [a Japanese restaurant] for her birthday because they would have to sit, Japanese-style, in a pit, and feared they would have trouble sitting down and getting up again.
What does a good life look like?
Posted by care at April 30, 2003 01:11 PM | TrackBack