Time is Life

I entered this internet bar in the full bloom of afternoon and now it's 11:30 in the evening and I've been here, minus a one-hour break to inhale food and be bummed about the dying of the light. I was so tempted to not come back but I'm "in the zone" as the referees say and I'll take this opportunity to inform you of my recent exploits.

I arrived back in Kunming yesterday, after a week and a half of general lurking in Shaxi and three days of sick relaxation in Dali. The slow pace of life in rural Shaxi was a breath of fresh air (as was the very unpolluted air) and I'm not exactly sure where all the days went. I know that on both of the two Fridays I was there I checked out the weekly market, a Valley-wide affair where one can procure anything from bootleg Nikes to batteries to laundry machines to medicine-man-made potions to any variety of freshly slaughtered meats and newly uprooted vegetables. Ironically the one thing you cannot buy is traditional Bai or Yi ethnic minority textiles, which happened to be the only items I was "in the market for," as they say. Nevertheless it was nice to feel like I was in Circuit City, Target, Whole Foods, and a Peruvian shaman's hut simultaneously while enjoying sunshine and a spectacular mountain view and being regaled by pre-adolescent calls of "Hei Taiyang!" (Mandarin for "Black Sun," the name I received in a dream and which has stuck on the tongue of every Chinese I've met, both because of its ridiculousness and because a six-foot bearded American is not a sight soon forgotten in Shaxi.)

I also did several hikes, one of which was a 4-hour trek to a remote mountain village called Mapingguan which can only be reached by horse, and the horses I encountered were usually encumbered with so much lumber and produce that their proprietors had to ride sideways with both legs hanging off the side of the neck. (That is until they excitedly jumped off and offered my friend and I cigarettes.) You might think such a removed burg would be totally off the map, but with Shaxi's increasing tourist development has come the need to sate the indefatigable feet of dreadlocked European backpackers and even sometimes-lazy American college students, so we were far from the first Westerners to strike out for these hinterlands. I personally was interested to see the town as it was once a major salt processing center, producing a valuable Tea and Horse Caravan commodity, and because I was growing listless spending my days people-watching in front of Xingjiao Temple at my favorite of Shaxi's two coffee shops.

Of course somewhere in there I also conducted interviews with Swiss architects and engineers, Shaxi government officials, international tourists, and local farmers who didn't know much about their own cultural heritage at all. I was so taken by the town that I also succeeded, with the help of my friend Marianna Tu, in setting up a volunteer English-teaching program for the Summer of '08 through the American NGO Learning Enterprises. This was a major undertaking for me, and it took a few translated and not meetings with a government official and such diplomatic tactics as Gan bei'ing (see 9/15/07) the Director of Education of the region to assure myself and my colleagues that the program would meet with the enthusiastic support of the local community. I'm extremely excited about returning to Shaxi to direct this program this summer and putting into practice some of the evolving ideas I've had about effective strategies of empowering the local people against the political and economic disenfranchisement that has accompanied Shaxi's development as a tourist site.

In Dali I relaxed, sick for much of the time. I've gotten at least six good colds in China, which tops my count for the last few years. On Tuesday Marianna and I met Brian and Jeanee Linden, a Wisconsin-based couple who are renovating a compound in nearby Xizhou village as an upscale hotel and "cultural think tank." I was impressed that Brian and Jeanee were so interested to show us around and solicit our input, tapping our thinking tanks for ideas on how to develop their business and provide a meaningful cultural experience to a wide variety of foreign and domestic visitors. Later that day we met Xiao Tian, a friend of one of the artists we'd met in Kunming, at a Western restaurant called Cafe de Jack. We were met for dinner by Jack himself, a Hui Chinese who is renowned in your Lonely Planet guidebook for producing a kind of herbal whiskey, along with a woman we'd met working at a cafe in Jinghong (Xishuangbanna) and who turned out to be Bai and from Xizhou. Small country.

Today I spent the better part of my waking hours in this very wang ba, sorting through my competing thoughts about Shaxi, culture, art, architecture, economic development, intangible heritage. I have a few days to write this paper, present, and buy a winter hat before departing for what promises to be a very cold Beijing. In Shaxi I went with a Bai traditional doctor to collect medicinal herbs on the side of a mountain. We booked the two kilometers from Sideng to Diantou village; he explained, "I walk fast because time is life." Now I have 7 minutes to walk 10 minutes home before my dorm's door is U-locked at midnight, so see ya,

Josh