Sep 26: The Filling of Back Home

(It would be far too easy to mock Chinese signs written in English, and not so sporting since their bad English is still better than my Chinese, but I did laugh hard at an ad for my hotel in Hangzhou that touted it as having "the filling of back home." I truly couldn't figure out what they were trying to say until I said the words out loud . . . )

I suggested that one should arrive in Hong Kong at night -- but one should definitely leave China in the morning. At 5:30 AM as I left my hotel in Shanghai, the streets were empty of cars, but people were starting to stir. It was blissfully quiet as I trudged down the street with my suitcase.

A taxi driver who had just parked his car and was rummaging through his trunk, called out to me with a smile, "Pudong Airport?" I said yes. His question had the tone of just making conversation, but still I motioned with my hands to ask if he wanted to take me. He motioned back that he was off for the night, and then walked with me across the street to a sidewalk dumpling. . . well, what do you call a family who sets up a wok of hot oil in front of their house and serves breakfast? -- a cafe? an eatery? a shop? a stand?

I bought some food for breakfast and the taxi driver again said "Pudong?" I said Pudong back, and then made a hop with my hands to indicate my next stop after that and said "And then, America." "America," he said, just to roll it around on his tongue. He was still repeating the word as I waved goodbye and caught a cab.

My memories of my last trip to China five years ago include so many interactions like this -- very helpful and friendly people, and an ability to make yourself understood and to understand without too much trouble. There were plenty of experiences like that this time too, but there were a few more of the exasperation-with-foreigners-who-don't-speak-the-language and let's-see-how-much-we-can-charge-the-tourist occasions than last time.

Anytime I saw early morning, however, China was beautiful and stereotypically serene -- pristine, cool air, with just a few people around and none of the clogged streets that show up soon enough.

Now I am home. Slammed by the time change, but happily home with all the wonderful things that implies: my own shower, my own kitchen, my own language, my family, my friends . . . and my perfect last image of China.

Wrapping Up: The Advice We Were Given

Advice people gave us before we left (and whether it was useful):

--If you can't read the menu, don't order the cheapest thing assuming it will be rice. It could be fish heads.

I was startled at how prevalant fish heads were in cooking -- as well as chicken and duck heads. A thing to watch for if you're squeamish. Putting a little napkin over a staring eye works well in a pinch.

--Boil any water you drink.

Never had any water issues. . . bought bottled water, but happily drank the water they gave me in restaurants and all was fine.

--Don't bring the anatomy coloring book along with the 72 pack of colored pencils, because c'mon, you're really not going to use it.

I have to admit, I kinda wished I had it a few times. On the other hand, I didn't REALLY need it. But I could have, say, brought this, and not 5 travel guide books.

--As much as you like sushi, you might want to stick to cooked foods.

The closest we got to raw food was the whole pick-which-live-animal-you-want-us-to-kill thing in Guilin, and the crawling shrimp at the Sichuan cooking class. Raw food just wasn't an issue.

--The best way to handle non-Western style toilets is to always wear skirts.

Um, there is no way to handle public bathrooms in a foreign country. It's pretty much always awful. Skirts are the least of it. Always, always carry toilet paper with you. Always hold your breath. Always monitor your water intake on days when you know you're going to be out all day. A little vicks under your nose before you enter does wonders. Train station bathrooms are the worst worst worst -- avoid them at all costs.

--Just because they invented paper doesn't mean they're going to be generous with it. Carry your own toilet paper.

See above. We even had hotels that didn't stock TP.

--Be prepared for locals to stop you and ask to take their picture with you.

This barely happened at all. It did the last time I was in China, but it seems to be a trend that is changing. What happened far more often was people who wanted to practice their English, or wanted to exchange e-mails or phone numbers with you -- this even when you shared no language in common, forcing one to wonder what would possibly happen if one of them DID call you.

--When in a big city, just suck it up and get a nice, pretty 5-star hotel.

Amen, sister!


--Don't eat street food.

Everyone always tells you to be so careful with street food, but I read a great piece of advice before going to India last year: trust the locals -- if they're eating there, you can too. Besides, usually they cook the food right in front of you in burning hot oil. What pathogen is going to survive that? And in China, street food is so ubiquitous, so cheap, so yummy, it would be a shame not to eat it. Our favorites: 1) a shop in Guilin that flash-cooked skewers of everything from octopus to mushrooms (we ate wontons and bok choy) and then rolled them up in hot sauce before serving it and 2) a wonderful scallion and spinach pie in Beijing.


--Bring some cute clothes with you because there will always be pretty French girls traveling who always look immaculate and hip and you will be so jealous if all you have are shorts and tank tops.

Absolutely true. We needed cute outfits on our very first night for the battleship. And after a week of traveling and looking all hippy-like, there's just a moment when you desperately want to do something to make yourself look good again. Of course, there's always buying something cute to wear. . .

Wrapping Up: Videos

I couldn't get these uploaded while I was traveling. . . but they're all available now. They're fairly big-- sorry -- but they're worth it. Lots of really cute pandas.

Pandas stealing bamboo
10-month old pandas attacking Mom
Panda somersault
Panda trying to climb
Panda trying to climb again
Panda climbing!

Irish Dancers on the Great Wall (randomly)

Wrapping Up: The Dragon Collage

Eleni and I took more photos of dragons than of anything else. . . here's the best of the lot.

Wrapping Up: The Hippo Collage

Of course, I took the hippo along with me again. . . and this whole series will seem a lot less pathetic if you think of the hippo as one of those gnomes people take and send around the world so they can take photos of it in foreign locales, as opposed to thinking of it as a grown woman's need to bring a stuffed animal with her along on vacation.

Besides, Neerad was MADE in China. It would have been mean not to bring him along on a trip to his home.

Sep 25: Mao again

I haven't gotten too much farther on my quest to understand the Mao thing, but Fang, a Z.U. fellow gave me an added piece for the puzzle.

He said two things of note. First that: "It was just too soon." He explained that after the revolution against Chiang Kai-shek Mao was considered such a hero that it was hard to tear him down now for the "mistakes" he'd made. There seems to be sort of a 60/40 thing going here, Mao is simultaneously considered 60% god -- note that every propaganda poster shows him with a halo behind his head --and 40% seriously-flawed human. I was going to write "40% devil" there for poetic symmetry, but I don't think its accurate. The negative feelings just don't seem that intense.

Fang explained this a bit by telling me about his father and grandfather. Both were professors, he said, and both sent to rural China to be "reeducated" by farmers during the cultural revolution. They spent ten years doing manual labor before returning home. Fang said clamly that his father now laughed about it more than anything, because what else could you do?

Acceptance doesn't explain the remaining pockets of downright reverence that still abound, but it's still a good clue. And one that has now been backed up by a second data point. I met a smiling man on the subway yesterday when I overheard him say the word "setenta" and focused in to see if it was a trick of my ears, or if he was indeed speaking Spanish. He was. He was explaining to an Italian, whose English was better than his Spanish, frankly, that he was sixty-years old, but didn't he still look young?

I jumped into the conversation, and in two metro stops I learned that he knew Spanish, Russian, English, Japanese, and French. When I asked if he had been to Spain, since his Spanish was so good, he said, no, he'd never left the country--and then, big smile never leaving his face, he said he'd been sent to the countryside for 25 years during the cultural revolution. He'd been a student in Nanjing, starting in 1965, and he had always loved languages. Five years later he was sent to be reeducated, and ten years ago he'd finally left the farms for Shanghai. Now he tutored English and Spanish, and taught foreigners Chinese. (If you need a tutor in Shanghai, I got his phone number.)

He was so joyful this man. He just switched back and forth between English, French, Spanish, a bit of German, offering smatterings of each, like he was playing. I mean it was almost dolphin-like -- pirouetting through different languages.

And, clearly, if your choices are life-long bitterness or being a happy 60-year-old, who revels in knowledge and bubbles over in the presence of friendliness, one should choose acceptance every time.

Advice for travelers to China: Street Crossing

Lights in China, I'm conviced, merely signal who has the right of way. A red light doesn't mean you have to stop, only that you have to yield if there's other traffic coming. As it is, traffic lights are in short supply anyway, and cars aren't. The traffic is non-stop and pedestrians--walk lights, crossing guards, and prettily-striped crosswalks not withstanding--are never given priority. If you are used to a car slowing down when you are on a collision course with them, you are in for a nasty shock. The pedestrian is always the person who has to get out of the way.

Three techniques to protect your health, from beginner to advanced:

a) Sidle up to a local, stick by their side, and cross with them.

b) Treat it like a giant game of Frogger: you only have to make it across one lane at a time. You'll never find a gap big enough to get across the whole street anway, and hanging out in the center of the road is considered perfectly acceptable.

c) After a week or two of playing Frogger, you will suddenly notice that the Force is with you, and that the elbowing people aside in crowds thing has taken on a larger aura. You will notice for the first time that a car actually swerves out of the way if you play chicken until the last moment. You will walk closer to the cars than you did before, scoot in and out of the hundreds of bicycles, and avoid scooters with ease.

Sep 23: Massage

This is just a note to say that after an hour and a half of a foot massage followed by a body massage two nights ago (for approximately $10) and returning to the same place today with Fabi for a scalp and shoulder massage and hair cut and ear cleaning and eyebrow arching and three green hair extensions (all for $8) I am REALLY bitter that I live in a culture where massages are considered rare and very expensive indulgences.

A wee example: Professor Ying organized the first outing for the MF board and various professors the other night. She told me ahead of time that she'd called to say we'd be coming in around 9 PM, but she didn't know how many of us there would be. Since I knew the number was somewhere between 15 to 20, this seemed a very big fact to leave out. Until I got there. The three-story building can accomodate over 100 people, and walk-ins are the norm.

SO bitter.

Sep 23: Acrobats

Conversations last night upon seeing Chinese acrobats hula hoop with one leg pointing up to the sky at greater than a 180 angle, perform serpentine gymnastics with seven lit candelabras balanced on their bodies, and balance several colleagues stacked on their shoulders while balancing on a plank on top of a ball:

Bill: "There just aren't muscles in your back that could let you do that."
Karen, open jaw working up and down trying to get some sound out: "Um. . . er. . "

Bill: "She can't have the same skeletal system I do."
Karen, shaking head: "Ar. . . ack."

Bill: "Can you imagine how compressed her spine must be?"
Karen: "Nnn. . argh."

Ok, a quick aside. . . you'd think from this blog that all I've done at this symposium is go out to theater events at night. I would like to take this opportunity to say that's not true. There have been some really wonderful traditional symposium events. The Germans put on a full-on carnival for their cultural presentation -- with clowns, can-can girls, men dressed in tutus, and Jester-style poetry -- which had everyone up on their feet cheering and dancing. This was immediately followed by the Dillard University students' presentation on Hurricane Katrina and the devastating effects on New Orleans, which had everyone tearing up. There have been fantastic presentations of Social Service Projects and great outings to see the sights of Hangzhou.

So, that having been said . . . let's move right on ahead to the acrobats we saw tonight.

When we were nine or ten, my parents took Holly and me to a Chinese acrobat show at the Kennedy Center. At one point, a man balanced one pole of a 20-foot ladder on his forehead. A woman climbed up the ladder to the top and then pulled a cord so that all the rungs, and the superfluous pole fell to the floor. She then grabbed ahold of a small red ball attached by some -- hopefully very strong -- rope to the top of the pole, and placed it in her mouth. At which point, attached just by her mouth, she began to swing her whole body around and around the top, her momentum keeping her rigid body horizontal to the floor like a helicopter propeller. Around a pole, balanced, may I remind you on a man's forehead.

As she circled through the air, Holly leaned over and whispered in all seriousness: "I bet you they practiced that."

The line has stayed with my family ever since, a catch-phrase we use whenever stunned by someone's prowess. . . but here's the thing -- having watched an acrobatic troupe tonight I am suddenly realizing "practice" is an entirely inappropriate term -- just as you would never say a native English speaker was fluent because they'd "practiced" so much. The dictionary definition jibes, but the skill set is far more intrinsic, an inherent part of daily life, a control over and flexibility of one's body that is as constantly used as speaking.

For one thing, these are transferable skills we're talking about here. Hell, if you can stand on one hand and then bend sideways at the waist until your legs are horizontal to the floor, then you're going to be able to do that on the floor, on someone's bent knee, or at the top of 12 chairs stacked on someone's bent knee. If you can balance a candelabra on the top of your head, you can also do it while swinging on a trapeze -- and from there it's a short jump to balancing a pole and a helicoptering woman.

It's not that they practice. . . it's that they live it. And they really do. The language comparison was a good one -- you have to learn to make your body work that way from when you're a young child. (In Xi'an, Eleni and I saw a 5-year old girl busqing for money by putting her mouth over the nob at the top of a one-foot high tripod, kicking her heels up over her head and then using her hands on the sidewalk, to spin herself around. In its way, it was one of the more disturbing things we saw here. ) Historically, one grew up in a Chinese acrobatic troupe, and it was all you knew. There was no education beyond that. Nowadays there is often tutoring, but the kids' time commitment to the troupe is still pretty total. Then, as you grow older, you graduate from being the slight girl doing the handstands on top of the 12 chairs, to the woman with the thick thighs of steel on whom the chairs are balanced. It's a whole life. It's really not something you practice; it seems to be something you breathe.

And as I sat there, agog, watching exquisite muscle control, impossible rubbery spine bends, and amazing balancing acts by young kids and teens who were far too muscular for their age, and who all have, I'm sure, fairly rudimentary literacy skills, all I could think was--I am SO going to make my daughter learn how to do that.