(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?
(another tale from last year's trip to China, which begins with the entry "Ni Hao, Beijing.")
Monday. What day is it? Oh yes, the 20th. We woke this morning with all of the familiar symptoms: fuzzy tongues, blurry eyes, sick stomachs, a deep feeling of dread. We had to wake up, get dressed, and get packed. What's on the roster for today?
First, breakfast. Nooooo. Please, no breakfast. Okay then, following breakfast is a tour of the Lama Temple, which we had visited several days before. When just standing up makes one feel sick, one cannot imagine breathing in sweet incense fumes, crushed shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow tour groups, following our guide’s fluttering flag. Noooo. No Tour. And then getting on the plane to Xi’an, god help us. We are booked on China Air, an airline with two recent, hard-to-forget disasters: one plane failed to miss a mountain, and the other simply fell apart in mid-air. Someone tells us a rumor that China Air craft are all Soviet rejects. This does not inspire confidence, not even when you are feeling really hale and hearty. This is not optional, though. We must get on that plane.
So, sick from the ‘white wine,’ we drag our sorry selves and our suitcases down to the lobby. Another colleague and tour participant is waiting there with his luggage. “Where’s your son?” we ask him. “Oh, he’s not feeling well, so he’s going to stay here while the group goes on the tour. Then, we’ll take a cab to the airport to meet up with them later.” I gape at him, then rush over to the checkout desk, where X is signing the hotel bill. I clutch his arm and tell him Itamar’s story. He gapes back at me. “We can do that?” In ecstasy and relief, we hand our bags over to the tour bus and secure our hotel room for another few hours of sleep, blissful sleep. On our way to the elevator, we come upon our companions from the night before and give them the same information. In turn, they gape at us. We have again been touched by the stupid-tourist guardian spirit. Sleep, blissful sleep.
It would be folly to think that the hangover would just wear off, just like that. The extra sleep only puts a little dent in the pain and sickness, just rounds off the sharp edges. In no time we find ourselves crammed in a taxi bound for the airport, then waiting in padded chairs for our tour group and our flight. X visits the airport snack shop and returns with two Chinese 7UP-style drinks and a Pringles-style container of potato crisps. If you’ve ever been this hung-over, you know that this is very good for you. Something about the combination of sugar, carbonation, and grease.
Rather abruptly, I do not feel at all well. I shove my belongings at X. “Watch these,” I command, and set off at a rapid clip down the large airport hall, toward the bathrooms. It seems like a very long walk, and on the way I realize that I am planning to go and vomit in a public restroom, but not just any public restroom. This is a public restroom with holes in the floor, where there are little bits of toilet paper stuck down amid small unidentifiable puddles. This is a public restroom with a pungent odor, because you never flush the paper you use, instead depositing it in a little wastebasket to one side of the door. In a more desperate situation I would not have cared, but here my will overcame my sick stomach. Just as I reached the doors of the restroom, I stopped. I squared my shoulders, told myself I felt fine, and turned around to make the long walk back to my seat.
(the saga of my trip to China last year continues, to give me something to post, you something to read, and all of us something to combat all of the bad press China's been getting lately.)
Physically speaking, I have felt slightly loopy ever since we got to China. After riding the elevator in the hotel or when I haven’t eaten for a while, I have brief moments of dizziness, like my brain spins 360 degrees in my head and then comes to a halt, rocking slightly. I don’t know what causes it, but it feels slightly like vertigo. My left leg is covered in itchy mosquito bites and though the first days I was bounding and invincible, exercising and going without lunch and forgetting to drink water, now the rings appear under my eyes. When I brushed my teeth this morning I spat blood; my tongue is raw. Did I burn it on the shaozi, or am I dessicating in the Beijing heat?
Monday, 20 May: I did not think it would happen to me but it has: I am tired of Chinese cuisine. Last night (19 May) we wandered the restaurant row until Molly had her ‘good feeling.’ Every waitress we have encountered tries to talk us into chicken with cashew nuts, pen marks all over the entry in the English menu. Instead, we ordered noodles with spinach (delicious), steamed broccoli (a welcome, basic dish), spare ribs (very fatty), and a boiled fish dish that arrives in an enormous bowl of steaming broth. There are more hot red peppers floating in the bowl than there is fish, and each bite is also full of red peppercorns. Patrick feeds me the cheeks of the fish, which he says are a delicacy. Again, the meal is cheap and tasty--¥88. We cross the street and encounter the same tiny flower-selling girls we had to dodge the other night [these very young—maybe 9 or 10 years old—girls sell fake roses, hounding anyone who doesn’t look Chinese with their “hello flower” singsong, repeated over and over and over until you either buy the flowers or run away]. X gives one some stickers [which we had brought just for this purpose] and this stops her in her tracks. We have to leave to keep her from shoving them back at us, and when we turn and look back at her from some ways down the block she is standing stock still in the same spot, just staring at the shiny stickers in her hands.
We return to the same Hutong restaurant we visited with some Europeans the day before and I am marginally successful at ordering YanJing beer and some snacks—weird boiled peanuts and spiced sunflower seeds. After we order, we see the waitress leave the restaurant, trot off down the alley, and return a few minutes later with a big package of the sunflower seeds. So accommodating! None of us really like the peanuts but we eat them anyway, for something to do, because we are the only customers out on the patio and there is nothing for us to look at. There is some sort of large dinner party going on inside the restaurant, and eventually Molly takes my phrasebook and decides to crash the party. What we learn when we finally develop the courage to go in and join her is that we have stumbled upon a work party for the restaurant [likely why there were no other customers] but that the owner is there, and he is exceedingly friendly and insists that we drink ‘rice wine’ with him. There is much shouting of "Gan Bei!" and clapping. This beverage resembles not wine so much as a sweet kind of battery acid that he can guzzle like soda water but which renders us blithering idiots in a matter of three tiny shot glasses. We were worried that turning them down would be rude, and I have a sort of ‘tough girl’ complex, so we kept toasting along with them, even going so far as to smoke a couple of their super-toxic, sick-making unfiltered Chinese cigarettes. No wonder everyone in China is coughing and hacking all the time.
We sang Beatles karaoke with them—so much more tuneful when really sloshing drunk—and the owner came on to Molly in the bathroom, even though his wife (who was extremely sweet and had been translating for us the entire time) was just outside. At that, we stumbled home. I cannot remember the walk itself, but I remember walking arm-in-arm with Molly, talking loudly about what a nice person I thought she was, as X walked nearby to protect us while Patrick raced at top speed toward the hotel so that he could be sick. Somehow we got home, and up to our hotel room, and after ridding myself of the horrible substances in my stomach, I somehow found myself outside the hotel room, in my stocking feet, and without a key card. I rode down the elevator in my confusion, got to the lobby and happily recognized my surroundings, so I rode back up to our floor and staggered back down to our door. All of the doors have little illuminated doorbells, which I recall thinking was very thoughtful, and I pressed ours so that X could let me in.
When no one answered the door, I had a moment of panic, thinking that I had just rung the wrong doorbell and that some poor sleeping person was going to pop out and yell at me in Chinese. I hurried back to the elevator to start the process again. Enter the lobby, recognize things, breathe a sigh of relief. Press the button for the eighth floor. Stand outside our door (this is the right one, yes?) pressing the doorbell rhythmically, wondering where I lost my shoes. I love those shoes! And my bag—where’s my bag? My notebook? Oh, no, my wallet! Ding dong. Ding dong. Ding-a-ding-a-ding dong. No answer. I rode down to the lobby and repeated the process. Finally, X woke from his rice-wine stupor and opened the door, and I fell upon him in grateful rapture, exclaiming something about being so lost, and not feeling well, and oh, there are my shoes and my bag, thank god! What was I doing in the hall? X just mumbled “Mmm-hmm” and fell upon the bed, as did I, fully clothed.
This is the most frightening part: we walk for hours at a time and never get hungry. Whether it is the constant adrenaline rush from being out of our element or the body’s revolt against the jet lag to which we cannot admit—we eat breakfast and do not get hungry all day. We guzzle bottled green tea and water but food is not appealing. I get small bouts of dizziness, though, and so X exhorts me to get some food at four o’clock.
My food at ten was a mushroom-egg sandwich consisting of three pieces of bread, a chopped up hard-boiled egg (yes, one egg!) and some thin, tan slices of canned mushroom. I removed the lettuce and avoided the salad. So far I have remembered to avoid all raw greenery [because E.Coli risk is so high, it is widely recommended that tourists not only avoid drinking water that is not in a sealed container, but to also avoid foods that have a high water content or may have been washed in water, like lettuce] and I am suffering withdrawal from my usual foodstuffs—so I go down to ‘Food Thought’ at four, in the basement of the hotel, and purchase the biggest bowl of happiness in the form of brown broth, buckwheat udon, seaweed, green vegetable leek-things, and one piece of fake crab. It pains me to waste it, but I leave the melon on the tray, untouched. Everywhere we see people buying fruit, the rinds and peels in white shopping bags or on the street—but I fear my stomach is not that tough.
18 May: I want to call people and tell them: You have got to try this China thing, man! It is so cool. We walked to the Friendship Store [government-run stores that sell things at higher prices, but haggling all the time can be exhausting] and bought some souvenirs for friends at home, as well as some lovely silk scarves and goofy handkerchiefs and cute pens. On the way out of the store we run into Itamar [X’s colleague] and his friends and son, who are on their way to the silk market. We should feel guilty that X did not attend Itamar’s talk, but we don’t—despite the fact that everyone else has apparently been attending several conference sessions a day. “But it’s China!” says X.
We meet up with Patrick and Molly and it turns out that Molly wants to go to the silk market, too, despite having been there yesterday. I talk down a vendor from ¥280 to ¥130 for a funky red backpack. It is shaped like an egg and functions with one back strap, two, or as a tiny briefcase with a handle. And did I mention that it has a massive zipper, at least ten times the size of a normal zipper? We are thrilled by its bizarre appearance. X purchases silk ties. Happily, I do not see any scarves for sale that I like better than the ones I purchased earlier. Then we retire to Haagen-Dazs for ice cream at ¥24 per tiny scoop, which seems very frivolous to me. The only Chinese people there eating ice cream are wearing very fancy clothes; it is obvious that this is something only very rich locals or silly tourists do.
After that we take the metro to the Lama Temple, Yonghegong, which turns out to be the least peaceful Buddhist temple I can imagine. At least ten buses idle in the ‘parking lot,” which is bounded on all four sides by red walls that are topped with ornate painted sculpture. Tour groups are absolutely everywhere, in every language imaginable; it is their buses that fill the parking area and turn it into a cacophony of motors and drivers yelling at other drivers to get out of the way. And there is of course a horrible stench of gasoline, helpfully held in by the tall brick walls.
The tourists (an identity we also share, lest we forget) flow across the walkways and into temples of ‘peace’ and ‘harmony.’ Mingling with the tourists are visitors there to light incense and prostrate themselves before the golden Buddha statues. It is beautiful, their bowing, the way they hold up the incense, shake it in each direction, close their eyes, and then place it in the enormous burners shaped like big barbecue grills. There is a statue of Buddha eighty feet high, carved from a single sandalwood tree. It, too, is beautiful, but there are such masses of people crowding all around that it is difficult to feel any real emotion.
Also, we are weak from heat and hunger. We visit an empty restaurant just down the street from the temple and order a bowl of millet-corn soup to share and 2 big bottles of beer [it really sounds like we drank a lot of beer, doesn’t it? We did. But it seemed thinner than American beer, and often it seemed the safest bet. Maybe that’s why we had so much fun]. The two waitresses working there alternate stalking flies with their plastic swatters; one spends a lot of time standing very close to a large mirror mounted on the wall, staring at herself and picking her teeth. We are flagrantly overcharged for our snack (¥45) but we are so glad to be refreshed that we do not care. As we leave I say to X, “how dare they charge us five dollars?” I am kidding. I am kidding.
Things are exactly the opposite at our dinner. We go off searching for a dumpling restaurant I had read about in my guidebook, but there are no Pinyin characters on any of the buildings and we cannot find any numbers either. We have an idea that we are on the right street, and finally we spot a restaurant packed with Chinese families eating out of bamboo steamers. We walk in and the waitress does everything in her power to get us to go to the upstairs portion of the restaurant. “This is Chinese fast food. Upstairs, bigger menu,” but we had been warned against this by the guidebook. We insist on staying downstairs, which seems to irritate her, and order steamers of incredibly good vegetable dumplings at ¥12 per steamer, guzzle beer, and laugh way too loud. Had we gone upstairs we probably would have been the only diners; down here we feel like we are a part of things. Afterward we go across the street to a CD shop and purchase the new Björk album, U2, Beatles, Jimmy Smith, and Ben Webster CDs at ¥15 each. It is truly sick how cheap everything is. Sick and all too easy to take advantage of with our wads of U.S. money.
I am judgmental enough to scoff at the other tourists who pride themselves on taking home polo shirts and ties at dirt cheap prices. Does anybody really need four Chinese robes? I fear I am looking at this all wrong, that we will have nothing nice to give to X’s mother because we simply cannot think beyond being jaded by the merchandise you can get everywhere in San Francisco’s Chinatown. We so easily forget the days when we clamored for resin Buddhas and wooden beads.
Is it possible that we are paranoid and overprepared? We meet up with Patrick and his ‘special friend’ Molly for dinner, and as we wander down a very dark alley peering in lit but deserted hole-in-the-wall restaurants, trying to decide where to try our luck, they tell us about their day. They had been approached by ‘art students’ like the ones that had approached X on his first day out, but they had been successful with Patrick and Molly and lured them into their ‘art gallery’ [this refers to a typical big-city China scheme: two personable youths with good English fall in step beside you, asking where you come from, how you like Beijing, and if you like art. If you ‘bite’ they take you to their gallery, where you politely admire the art. Upon deciding to leave, they tell you that they wish to present you with a ‘gift’ of their art, and you are pleased to have made a new friend and received such a gift. However, the protocol dictates that you must pay something for it, and they insist, so you give them what they suggest. It is usually far more than the ‘art’ is worth]. We probably should not have told them that we had known about this tourist trick. Once that came out, we started comparing notes. They hadn’t gotten shots, and they hadn’t heard about the chopstick caution. They had been wandering the streets all day hobnobbing with bird merchants, watching people eat bugs sold from street vendors, and eating ‘dubious’ dumplings.
Little white dogs on leashes are everywhere. The guidebook says that people were only recently allowed to own dogs once again [during the Mao heyday, pets were frivolous and forbidden]. Cigarette vendors. The rip-off trade is huge here [no idea what I was referring to, unless it was the number of men who sidled up to us and whispered, “DVD, VCD, good price.” One fellow traveler told us that he had gotten The Lord of the Rings on DVD just the day before, despite its only recently been released in theaters.]. We finally decide on a small but tidy restaurant where the waitress attempts to recommend the most expensive dishes—duck, market-price shrimp. We finally decide on tofu, beef, garlic broccoli. We order TsingTao, four, and each one is about one liter. Molly wants some log-shaped fried batter things that she saw the other patrons eating. They are creamy and white on the inside, and Patrick is afraid they are deep-fried lard. My guess is that the slightly sweet gel within is glutinous rice [they turned out to be rice wine jelly covered in batter]. We eat and poke and wonder about the safety of the food, but it turns out to be both safe and good. When we have finished, the women sweep the plastic door strips aside dramatically and usher us out.
17 May: Today was our Hutong adventure. We rode the metro to Tiananmen Square and mingled with a comforting number of fellow tourists. Little Japanese girls flashing the “v” sign, people carrying cheap Chinese flags on sticks, girls wearing baseball caps. We walk and drink bottled green tea and dodge the junk sellers and about four “art students” of our own. Seemingly everyone wants to know, “Hello, hello, are you American?” We wander the alleys—boys on fast bikes, men pulling metal trailers, tiny children running, old men sitting and smoking. Food, haircut, fruit. People stop talking to us as we move further and further down the hutong [alley]. Do they not want to see us there, or are they just trying to be inconspicuous to us?
Soon we are back to the congested, colorful lane with garbled English signs. We enter the fray and bargain. A MashiMaro watch for me, sunglasses for X. Two dollars. One-fifty. We meander shoe shops and no one bothers us—my feet must be enormous. What size is Chinese 25? It is the largest they have. We become intoxicated by the cheap goods—everything starts to look good. It seems everything in China is one dollar. I want a tee-shirt with silly English words on it and try to ask if it comes in my size. The salesgirls smile at me as though they find the idea ridiculous. Giant American. Finally an older woman puts aside her bowl of rice and little bean items and holds it up to my body. She stretches the fabric. “Good. Beautiful. Good,” she says. I stretch the armhole. “Is it big enough?” I say, and flex my muscle. She laughs. “Too big!” she says, and pulls out another shirt. “Better.” It could be the exact same size, but this one has white racing stripes on the shoulders.
We pick up one of those tacky Mao lighters [that plays 'The East is Red' when you flip the lid] and a weird wallet—“hello kitty,” it says, but it features two very freaky looking rabbits wearing dresses—for Tony and Heather. Earlier we had seen Bendik [X’s colleague] and his friend Hovard and they had regaled us with their laundry list of purchases. Utterly horrifying, the litany of backpacks, North Face jackets, watches, robes, ties, blah blah blah. Tacky, acquisitive stuff, I thought, but oh my, the thrill of the cheap is a heady drug.
16 May 2002: X went out on the street today while I was running on the treadmill. He said it was exhausting—the smells, the noise, the people trying to talk to him. His description made me apprehensive, but we went out all the same, using the basement of the hotel with its overpriced fashion boutiques as a buffer. The air does feel heavy with smog, and the taxi drivers seem to see their car horns as a natural extension of their hands. They zoom around corners and through crosswalks utterly unconcerned with the pedestrians or bicyclists in their way. After seeing the fifth near-miss, I stop thinking about it. We walk past restaurants and adult ‘love-shops’ and embassy after embassy—all complete with dour suspicious-looking guards and waist-height barbed-wire fences behind which languish pink roses and lovely green trees. We come upon Ritan park, which houses the Temple of the Sun. Sacrifices were once made here. Immediately upon entering (¥1, which seems to be a tourist-only fee, because I see no one else paying) we are enveloped by greenery and quiet. A few people wander the paths. Children play. As we moved deeper into green I began to smell flowers instead of dirt and leaded gasoline. We sat on a stone bench and watched a large group of adults exercise on bright yellow and blue equipment—a playground for adults. It was near the lunch hour, so we speculated that this must be a common post-lunch activity—twisting from the waist, ‘running’ on elliptical machines, swinging the legs back-and-forth on foot rests. One man grasped a large wheel with both hands and rotated himself around in a circle, stretching his shoulders and arms. Some people laughed and chatted while they touched their toes and pushed their feet against weighted bars (like doing leg presses at the gym); others were concentrated on more balletic and gymnastic tasks. I was so delighted by the idea of exercise as a normal, fortifying part of one’s day, and as a gentle, playful event rather than the punishing obligation it is in the west. Westerners need more play—not games—and more social normalcy—not play-dates. I loved these women in their white coats and the men in ties, taking time to engage in group activity, in something that in the US might be considered foolish in appearance. Something that is so clearly beneficial but seen as utterly normal.
We came upon a mini-golf course and played a dismal game (¥25 each). People paused at the fence to watch, applauding when X made a particularly good shot. A big group of men stood nearby, outside the golf enclosure, huddled together over a game of cards. They were too noisy—the yelling, the hard snap of the cards connecting with the stone tiles—for it not to be gambling.
We tested the park toilets to see if they were as horrid as people had said they would be. I was partly disappointed and partly joyed to see a door, a sink, and a hand dryer—but I still had to squat and urinate into a shallow, keyhole-shaped trough. Had I needed to pee with more urgency, I might have splashed my shoes. As it was, the flush mechanism sprayed out enough water to get my shoes wet anyway.
The language thing is definitely a problem when, as is the case with us, we don’t even know our numbers. Wu shi=fifty. We try to get TsingTao beer (¥12) downstairs at the in-house café by ordering in Chinese, but the sweet girl has no idea what we are talking about. “Ah, pijiu? Pijiao?” I say, pointing at the beer, and finally she gets it, no thanks to my sloppy attempt at Mandarin. “Ah, beer!” she says, and serves us.
Basically we are allowed either 1) situations where no one understands us but goods are cheap or 2) situations where we pay and arm and a leg so that we might be understood. In a misguided attempt to be a polite tourist, I had gotten a Mandarin phrasebook, thinking that, as Mandarin is the official language of China, it would be very helpful. What I didn’t realize was that just because the Chinese government decides to assign an official language to the whole of this enormous country, there is no guarantee than anyone at all speaks it. Doubtless I would have done much better with a Cantonese phrasebook. Still, I learned again and again that you can at least garner some smiles with “hello” and “thank you.”
China has been getting a really bad rap these days. Yes, people are dying of a highly communicable disease with mysterious origins, but I had such a great time there last year (my first overseas trip ever) that I thought I would post my journal entries from that period. A love-letter to China, despite being glad I'm not traveling there now.
[note: one Yuan is the equivalent of about twelve cents]
12 May 2002: “We made it. Step one of five hundred.” This is what xian tells me as we wait at the gate for our flight. Even the pilots are waiting here with us, slumped over against the wall. I am already amazed by things: the airplane is just outside the huge glass windows, and it is the biggest airplane I have ever seen. “It has an upstairs!” Last night I dreamed of walking off the plane into a massive, bustling airport with no English signs. I dreamed of wandering through dusty streets. I dreamed that a person with us was a belligerent haggler in the markets and got us all into a lot of trouble (all of which happened later).
I can’t believe we are doing this. X says it is time I face our “new, modern lifestyle of global jet-setting,” but I look at the hills out the window and the faces of our flight attendants framed by their royal blue uniforms—and I cannot believe we are doing this.
4:25 pm PST: X has the unfortunate luck of being seated next to a man who periodically horks up a wad and spits into his waterproof disposal bag. I want to give him mine, too, so that he can seal his spit up safely—it seems more sanitary to use several bags than the same one for ten hours. If I find this unsanitary, what will China be like?
Our Air China flight was less impressive than I had hoped. I had been led to expect televisions on all the seat backs and fantastic friendliness, but really it was just like a domestic American flight, except for the free beer. Upon first sitting down, we looked up and noticed that there was a cork poking out of the center air nozzle; it was from a bottle of red wine. This created visions of air pressure imbalance leading to the POP! of the cork—or as X put it, “in the event of a change in cabin pressure, wine will begin flowing from the overhead compartment.” This was funny until we discovered that one of the lavatories was out of service, the “lavatory occupied” sign was out (leading to some serious bottlenecks at the emergency exit) and that the audio jack for our entire row was not functioning. I could not have watched “Dr. Doolittle 2,” “Saving Silverman,” or the Chinese gangster movie if I wanted to, which was ultimately a good thing.
10 pm Beijing time. Proud moment so far: the taxi driver tells us to pay the ¥15 toll and we only have a ¥50 note; he folds up the change on the dash and then surreptitiously stashes it in the door pocket. I start to ask him for the money back in my guidebook Chinese (which consists of finding a word I need and then attempting to pronounce it in a querying tone: “ching?”) and he tells me he speaks some English, so I ask him for the change back. He pretends not to understand me and starts arguing about the price of the taxi ride. We discover later that he charged us about ¥50 too much, so the triumph is hollow, but I am still proud when I get the change back. “Xie xie,” I say to him, and he chuckles.
Beijing appears to be a city under construction or destruction—it’s not clear which. A haze renders the city overcast Wednesday and Thursday. I find myself enjoying the Chinese pop music station despite the fact that the music is exactly the same trite, insipid garbage I pooh-pooh at home. The unfamiliar words lend more mystery.
It's time for me to talk a little bit about what's good.
What's good is taking a vacation. Nothing fancy, mind you, just maybe a little drive up to the Dry Creek Valley in Northern California to do some wine-tasting (read: sipping for free). This is after the trip to Big Sur, so we had had our fill of hiking and gawking at nature's blatant beauty, and so we were in the mood for something more subtle. And nothing soothes like a lot of green trees and some really nice wine, let me tell you.
So here we are driving north, passing little towns and some zealous bike-riders, and we stop to sip some wines (and the pourer asked us for y\our birthdays, which was quite a nice treat, having just hit our third decade and all), and then we drove up to find the place we'd booked for our overnight stay.
Because I am a fervent reader of travel guides but a lover of the small and unconventional, I took the advice of the Moon Travel people and booked a night at the "interesting" Isis Oasis Sanctuary. Check it out for yourself: you can gape at animals or have a peaceful temple meditation, hot-tub, or just retire to your cozy little yurt. We had booked the "tower room" on the advice of the proprietrix, who was the proud owner of this ten-acre property.
Picture a medium-sized building, roofed entirely in opaque plastic fiberglass to allow the sunlight in. The building houses one large room filled with round wicker chairs, a fireplace, 1970s padded metal chairs, and synthetic wood-topped tables (you know, the kind whose legs you can fold underneath for simple storage). Several people--perhaps ten or so--are seated around the main table and at small two-tops to each side. Nearly every woman is wearing a caftan and excessive eye-makeup. There is no time to stare, however, because the proprietrix and her priestess friends turn their heads toward us and say, "Ah! You're staying in the tower room, right?" As the proprietrix walks toward us, the bejeweled headress that tops her grey Cleopatra-style hair jingles.
Is it that obvious that we're not here for the worship services or the hot tub?
I was actually very sorry to stick out so, because they all seemed like lovely people. We were given the keys to our room even though "it's already unlocked" and told to come down for breakfast at 9:30. X and I eyeballed each other as we drove the short path to the tower. Our eyeballs were saying, "well, let's just see how it is."
Essentially, this place was a commune. The wild animals are a hobby of the owner--exotic birds, small wildcats, and semi-domestic fowl make up the collection. The other people we saw wandering the grounds seemed very comfortable, as well as very aware of the fact that we were definitely visitors. A commune that brings in a little B&B business on the side. Good for them.
The tower was nothing special--just a two-story shack, cobbled together out of wood and plywood with shake shingles. The light fixtures, however, were statues of Isis hoisting lit globes, the wall heater was a large canvas-sized painting of Isis, and lotus flowers were prominent in the bedspread and small stained-glass windows. Upon climbing the stairs to the turquoise-walled tower room and settling ourselves on the turquoise cushions, we started to feel the tower power.
Perhaps it was the fact that the roof was a pyramid channeling universal energy. Perhaps it was the woosh of the highway just several hundred yards away. Perhaps it was all of the wine we'd sipped. But we definitely were feeling the tower power. It feels a little like the tingle you get when you're jazzed up about something, or have had a little too much coffee, but it extends itself to all of the nice sensitive parts of your body. It wasn't just a one-time thing, either. We spent a lot of time in the tower at different times of day, and the tower power prevailed. Whatever the source, tower power is real. Trust me.
Perhaps you'd like to book your stay at the Isis Oasis now? That's fine. But please wait until I've finished my story.
We dined in Healdsburg that night, chatting with the locals, who were shocked to hear where we were staying ("The only people I've met who've stayed at the Isis have multiple facial piercings"), and fell soundly asleep in our profoundly comfortable bed among the white noise of the freeway traffic.
Upon arising, we showered in the room-size, fully-tiled shower and spent a little more time absorbing the Tower Power. Later, sauntering down the path to the main building, trailed by a large Maine Coon cat, we headed towards the main building for our breakfast. We passed the temple and the fountain dedicated to the goddess, crossed the large lawn, and visited with the animals (who seemed rather agitated on this morning) and the large brown cat that guards the ancient fir. When a reasonable breakfast hour arrived, we passed through the sliding glass doors and were invited to rest with some tea or coffee while a toothless, ponytailed man made our breakfast ("scrambled eggs, or over-medium?"). Lovebirds squawked from a nearby cage.
And the breakfast, when he brought it to our table, was fantastic. He served two other women in caftans (whom he referred to as "priestesses," as in, "priestesses, your breakfast is served.") at the same time, and we had the very distinct pleasure of eavesdropping on their conversation about the care and handling of exotic birds. Everything was so pleasant and not at all creepy (no one even invited us to celebrate the mass, which was taking place later that day, or to stay for the 'spiritual massage'), and we got the feeling that they were just letting us be--because we were also allowing them to simply be.
What struck me the most about the Isis Oasis was that these people--priestesses and otherwise--were living in an environment they had chosen because it allowed them to realize some aspect of their life that had previously been lacking. In addition, I found myself envious of the conviction it must take to be a commune-dwelling, caftan-wearing worshipper of Isis. I have no interest in religion, but I continue to be fascinated by people with a great deal of conviction, especially when it involves a great deal of open-minded acceptance. I did find myself wondering, however, what would happen if one of the priestesses took a notion to go down to the Goodwill one day and get herself a halter-top, some capri pants, and a pair of rollerblades. Would they be as accepting then?
Now, this is probably not the time or the place to be saying this, but I'd still like to know: if you voted for Ralph Nader, do you still think that Bush and Gore are the same? How would the last two years have been different if Gore had been elected president?
Rabble-rouser.
Anatomy of a life lived entirely in little bits:
Wander about, never giving one thing your full attention. Do chores and assignments half-way (wash the laundry but fail to put it away. Make your tea and leave it on the counter all day) for maximum dilettantism.
Look out the window. Perhaps you are avoiding the work you have to do, or perhaps you are just looking.
Eat a handful of something (peanuts, dry cereal, strawberries). By all means do not eat an entire serving of anything--it interferes with the dabbling.
Listen to the same album on repeat (Tom Waits: Mule Variations) for hours.
Read at least three books at one time (The Wind In The Willows, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and How to be Alone by Jonathan Franzen) and thus fail to fully absorb them. At at least one point in your life you will enter a library or bookstore and take home a book you have already read because of this terrible habit.
Become very thoughtful about the ways of life and develop personal theories while observing yard wildlife, thus:
I have been watching a squirrel mine seeds from the feeder. It has been at this task all morning. The way the squirrel gets its snack is rather ingenious: the feeder, a seed-filled tube within a metal cage, is designed to keep away marauding bands of squirrels and large bully birds like Blue Jays and Crows. The entire contraption hangs on a wire that extends down from a tree branch.
Our hero, the bushy little rodent, shinnies down the wire and climbs down the cage to hang upside-down from the cage by his back feet. From this position the little bugger can lick the saucer of the feeder to extract fallen seeds, hold them in his free front paws, and nibble them open.
I used to rap on the window when I caught this circus act in progress, because all who feed birds know that squirrels spoil the fun. I quickly tired of this stingy behavior, though: for one, I felt like the nasty neighbor-woman of my childhood who would knock reprovingly on her windowpane if we so much as set one toe in her yard; and two, it's really a very symbiotic relationship. The usually insatiable squirrel only gets the seeds that the overzealous birds drop onto the saucer and fail to retrieve, so it's really performing a vital clean-up task. Additionally, it doesn't stay there all day: it either runs out of available seeds or gets a headache from all of the blood pooling in its skull, because it leaves in a timely fashion and gives the chickadees and finches and titmice a chance to sup.
Spend an hour reading .blogs or browsing the new releases at your favorite online bookstore.
I just returned from two separate, very different vacations that took place within three hours of one another. One took place in Big Sur, where we stayed in a very rustic cabin next to a river, played rummy, and hiked up steep redwood paths to see incredible vistas. The other was a trip up to the Russian River Valley, to visit wineries and picnic next to tender lilac bushes while farm cats rubbed our ankles.
I feel sometimes like I am living multiple lives at once, and never comfortably settling in to any of them. Too interested in wineries and just a little too aged in years to feel really fine around twenty-five year old Inner Mission dwellers, the kind of girls who wear skirts they bought in "a really cute little boutique in Noe Valley"--but too enamored of punk politics and secondhand stores and DIY to find the Aix-en-Provence wine snobs tolerable.
I'm a fence sitter. I hover. I guess it's always been a little like this.
More later on the frozen-in-time feel of Point Lobos Reserve and the Isis Oasis Retreat.