"This person, these people, I can not know where they have been"

I think it's been a month since my last post. You all have had at least one daylight savings shift, not me. I spent a few days in the town of Dali recently and it feels like the clock is melting.

I've been in northwestern Yunnan for two weeks. It's a very old place. In fact I've been in at least four "old towns" which here means architectonically traditional places designed to sell tourist hordes virtually identical symbols of polyglot culture. I truly mean polyglot as I've heard and seen a slew of languages used in the region, both living and dead. Yesterday I witnessed a ritual performed by Dongba priests, Naxi minority shamans with an ancient tradition stretching from time immemorial to the precise date of Communist presence in the region. At this time Dongba was officially decreed a superstition and all but eradicated to the ideologically immune Naxi villages of the extreme rural hillside. Dongba religion was reconstituted as "culture" and moved from the realm of elite masculine pedagogy to the realm of still masculine urban intellectual tradition with the foundation of the Dongba Culture Research Institute at the end of the Cultural Revolution. The performance I witnessed was by an ancient man with a picture-perfect white wisp beard who blew into hollowed cow horns and danced around sculptures that looked to be made out of some sort of pastry with a large blade in his mouth. Our lecturer, a polite apologist from the Institute, informed us that since he is old he may have "forgotten" some of the traditional ways. In fact our Dongba was a forgery, one of the many similarly dressed and bearded men who pose for photographs with tourists in front of clothing shops in Old Town Lijiang (a UNESCO World Heritage Site and tourism megahaven). Still Dongba is fascinating to me, and the Naxi Dongbas have the only living pictogrpahic script in this whole panorama of human experience. The script was traditionally only read and written by the shamans (often the only literate members of Naxi society) but is now the province of scholarly research not only at the Institute but also at Harvard and European universities. I'm not in a position to question authenticity as I'm not sure if I believe in the authenticity of the very ideological construct of "authenticity". I've taken all of my experiences in Old Town Yunnan with a large grain of salt. Often this grain of salt comes with crystallized ginger and a healthy dose of "numbing pepper", a local herbal favorite which as the name may suggest has lead to a number of half-tasted meals.

I've met three "living buddhas" in the past 5 days. Living Buddha (Ch.= "huo fo") is a bad translation (from Tibetan to Chinese) as none of them believe themselves to be actual buddhas. Maybe bodhisattvas. In practice reincarnated Lamas chosen from the tender age of five years old to enter monastery in Lhasa and embark on the 28-year process of attaining a Tibetan Buddhist "PhD" (bad translation, from Chinese to Latin abbreviation). The most famous Living Buddha is of course the Dalai Lama, believed by Yellow Hat Vajrayanists to be a walking avatar of the peoples' favorite bodhisattva, Guanyin (Skrt.=Avalokitesvara , Japanese=Kanon, Tibetan=Chenresig). I've met less famous provincial LB's, who were keen to instruct us on the metaphysical ramifications of electricity and the finer details of how to achieve and be liberated from future incarnations as a plant. Two of the Buddhas were monks living in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in the towns of Zhongdian (name now officially changed to "Shangri-La" by the Ch. government, no doubt another tourist ploy) and Lijiang. The third was the mother of a friend I've made at Minzu Daxue in Kunming. She was chosen as a Living Buddha at the age of 5 and entered the monastery, only to have her monastic life revoked during the Cultural Revolution. Now she works as government official and gracefully sipped at her glass of beer over dinner. Practicing Lama or not, she did exude a kind of spiritual knowingness I could never emulate and I felt true warmth from her as she embraced me before taking me out to dinner last night. All this hospitality from someone who merely knew I knew her son.

Hospitality. I must have gained at least five pounds in the last month. My Kunming host mother was an excellent cook and felt personally slighted if I didn't eat three persons' worth at every meal. She is an English teacher so while our conversations didn't do much to improve my Mandarin, she was eager to learn (as was I) of the cultural differences between Chinese and Americans. Our conversations often revolved around food. She was shocked to learn that Americans love bread so much that we even eat lunches that consist of nothing but bread with things placed in between. She seemed particularly repulsed by the idea of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and chided me when I attempted to drink coffee with my morning noodles since "sweet and salty do not mix well in the stomach." I had a short 3-day homestay in the rural Bai minority village of Sideng. My homestay mother there spoke no English and really not much Chinese either. She graciously accepted that I was vegetarian when I declined to eat a piece of the unidentifiable slab of "salt meat" (bad translation, Bai to Chinese to English) that was hanging on the kitchen wall for the duration of my homestay. She proceeded to feed me a succession of noodle bowls that only ceased when I had to grab my bags and catch the bus to Zhongdian. The food is predominately starch, carbohydrate, and grease, but the people are healthy. In Sideng I experienced why when I assisted my homestay family in the harvest. After a few hours of baling and hauling rice my body was aching, my arms cut and sore, my excess caloric intake sufficiently burnt away.

Sideng is an interesting place. It boasts an old Market Square that was a lively center of cultural and commerical exchange during the heyday of the Tea and Horse Caravan that connected China to India and the West via Tibet in ancient times. Sideng is downhill from Shibaoshan, an ancient Buddhist mountain with numerous temples and grottoes. These grottoes contain spectacular sculptures (carved into the mountain itself) of ancient regional kings, Buddhist deities carved in the style of Indian art, and an enigmatic vagina statue whose significance scholars and locals have conflicting ideas about. The grottoes encapsulate in a visually comprehensible form the syncretic and shifting construct that is Chinese antiquity, where kings turn to gods, gods turn to beasts, and raw stone is transformed (either by humans or Mother Nature's own entropic agency) into a symbol of sexual fecundity.

Now I'm writing from Lijiang, about to take a fantastically inauthentic "Western" meal and spend the evening visiting many of the not-so-cultural attractions of the old town's "Bar Street" (good translation). I don't know what my tone is in writing this, probably a mixture of disenchantment, enchantment, philosophical confusion, linguistic profusion, visual oversaturation, core intercultural appreciation. Please know that I've loved every second of this trip and as I work to sort through this bewildering morasse in my mind I will express my emerging thoughts more articulately and cogently at some unspecified future date. I return to Kunming tomorrow, where I'll begin researching cultural heritage preservation efforts in Sideng and Shibaoshan and have a quick week to decompress. Time to reorganize my life and if and when I do I will keep you POSTED.


Toasted,
Josh