I leave Beijing in 11 hours. Following the advice of a good friend I've taken my last few days here slowly, letting my obligatory last-minute holiday shopping, sight-seeing, and city slumming unfold at a pace that has allowed me to re-experience the small minutiae of Chinese life and culture that I long ago began to take for granted and will soon begin to miss the most.
It took me a few days to get a feel for Beijing. I practically experienced as much culture shock coming here from Yunnan as I did stepping of the plane in Kunming. Here I've seen modernized (and modernizing) China, a sprawling metropolis in the process of stepping up to the world limelight in preparation for 8/8/08. I didn't know much about Beijing besides Tiananmen Square, where I saw Mao's paternal, satisfied grill surveying the small troop of overt and covert police guarding the Chinese flag and breaking up any and every public "demonstration," including my friend's short-lived performance with a yo-yo he'd bought at the Summer Palace. In the middle of the Square I saw Mao again, here a waxy (likely wax) body interred in a massive mausoleum filled with silent tourists and businessmen visiting the spot for good luck. Mao's omnipresence was only matched--exceeded even--by that of the "Specially Licensed Olympic Commodity Merchandiser". Beside the countdown ticking away in a government building opposite the Great Hall of the People I of course encountered an endless stream of hustlers grinding to get mascot keychains and "official" t-shirts into my hands and foreigner funds out of my wallet. I wonder if Mao had a grave that wasn't guarded by two armed military personnel around the clock whether he would turn in it.
My first impressions of Beijing were not positive. All I saw was a giant, thoroughly polluted and ostensibly cultureless mass lacking the charm (and killer street food) of Kunming, which had begun to feel like my home base between my sporadic trips to farmland and frontier. After I got my feet on the ground and my head in the right place (i.e. into a winter hat) I made an effort to get to know this city for what it is. I visited the 798 arts district and for the first time saw a large, international contemporary art scene in China, splitting my time between a noise record shop called Sugar Jar and Galleria Continua, where I saw an interesting Anish Kapoor exhibit. I did some excellent hikes on the Great Wall, which allowed me to cross a World Wonder off the list and scope some spectacularly ruined, decrepit, and unpopulated sections of the planet's largest man-made structure. The most fun I've had here has been at the indoor markets, however, where all the Mandarin I've managed to learn in my short time here has culminated in an expert admixture of humor, flirtation, and pure will power aimed toward the end of garnering my last-day pickups at the "enlightened foreigner" discount.
And I am a foreigner. I've spent many hours in dimly lit internet bars writing posts like this, emailing you all, planning my future, pining for the familiarity and comfort of home. I distinctly remember each time leaving the wangba with the sun a little lower in the sky and thinking how leveling the internet is, allowing me to follow certain patterns of life that are my rote at home and that I can more or less maintain anywhere in this increasingly interconnected planet. Then I get yelled at by a 90-year-old woman furiously trying to sell me a steamed bun and a bootleg Adidas backpack, or led by the hand by a concerned onlooker who knows I'm lost and swears by the Buddha that it's much too far to walk back to my dorm on my own, or taken to dinner by the family of a friend of a friend I made on the basketball court, and I realize I could only be in China. Then I realize this is what I'll miss the most.
Showing posts with label Fall 2007. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fall 2007. Show all posts
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Thursday, December 06, 2007
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
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
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Center of the World
Quick (?) update on my life.
I spent two weeks in Kunming, reading, researching, writing, and happily coffee shop bumming. My main concern has been learning all I can about Shaxi, the small farming village where I harvested rice and became entranced by the town's ancient architecture. Shaxi is located in a valley that boasts a ca. 500 BCE bronze culture and a centuries-long tradition of international cultural and economic exchange with Tibet and India via a number of trade routes alternately named the Southwestern Silk Road, Tibet-Burma-Yunnan route, and Ancient Tea and Horse Caravan. I've been interested in Shaxi's history, as well as its developments in the 21st century, which have consisted mainly of sustained material heritage preservation efforts spearheaded by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Shaxi has an old market square which was a major hub for the Tea Horse Caravan; the square includes an old Confucian theater and a Ming Dynasty temple called Xingjiao, which was used until the last 100 or so years for the practice of Azhali, an esoteric sect of Buddhism based on Tibetan tantric practices but locally and culturally specific to the Bai ethnic minority of Yunnan province. The temple was converted into an administrative building by Communist officials during the Cultural Revolution but has been restored by the joint Swiss-Chinese Shaxi Rehabilitation Project and now once again enjoys pride of place in Shaxi's market square, a site of tourist visitation fronted by two imposing demonic "guardian king" statues (pictures forthcoming, if I ever remember my Flickr password).
I did have some much needed decompression time in Kunming, during which time I thought a lot about cultural heritage preservation. As an Art History/Archaeology double major, I study aesthetic objects in their ancient and modern contexts. Since I've been in China, I've realized that I am very interested in the contemporary uses that such objects are put to, the various "agencies" they reflect. China is development-hungry, and in most places where the Cultural Revolution did not totally destroy ancient art and architecture, these are being restored mainly to serve the purpose of attracting domestic and international tourists. In the interviews I've conducted with government officials and the head of the Jianchuan County Cultural Relic Preservation Institute, there has been no distinction made between "cultural relics" and "cultural heritage." Both are used to refer to the materials left from a history that is distant not only in terms of the time that has passed, but also the ideological turns that have made the Four Olds of Chinese antiquity an object to be destroyed for the Communists and an object to be developed by contemporary entrepreneurs intent on collecting tourist cash. Little attention is payed to the indigenous populations whose history this is, the minorities and rural people who have a direct lineal connection to these cultural artifacts but who are being displaced by the business-savvy urban immigrants who have swooped in on towns such as Shaxi, attracted by the economic prospects of development and at best only marginally interested in the cultural ramifications of heritage revitalization. I came to Shaxi two days ago, and I am in fact writing this on a laptop borrowed from Allen, a Chengdu native whose English skills were honed in Switzerland and whose bar in the market square is only the most recent link in the chain of non-Shaxi, non-Bai development of the town.
So that's where I am and what I'm doing. There is one other American here, a student on my program who is studying traditional Bai medicine (the Bai ethnic minority composes the majority of Shaxi's very poor rice farmers). Last night in this remote farm town we ate Thanksgiving dinner with our Chinese friend Nancy, a Frenchman, an Italian, a Hong Kong banker and a Taiwanese hotel owner. Afterwards, we enjoyed fine Chilean wine with a group of Swiss delegates and an Indian civil engineer who's been working in Zurich for five years. That's globalization.
I spent two weeks in Kunming, reading, researching, writing, and happily coffee shop bumming. My main concern has been learning all I can about Shaxi, the small farming village where I harvested rice and became entranced by the town's ancient architecture. Shaxi is located in a valley that boasts a ca. 500 BCE bronze culture and a centuries-long tradition of international cultural and economic exchange with Tibet and India via a number of trade routes alternately named the Southwestern Silk Road, Tibet-Burma-Yunnan route, and Ancient Tea and Horse Caravan. I've been interested in Shaxi's history, as well as its developments in the 21st century, which have consisted mainly of sustained material heritage preservation efforts spearheaded by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Shaxi has an old market square which was a major hub for the Tea Horse Caravan; the square includes an old Confucian theater and a Ming Dynasty temple called Xingjiao, which was used until the last 100 or so years for the practice of Azhali, an esoteric sect of Buddhism based on Tibetan tantric practices but locally and culturally specific to the Bai ethnic minority of Yunnan province. The temple was converted into an administrative building by Communist officials during the Cultural Revolution but has been restored by the joint Swiss-Chinese Shaxi Rehabilitation Project and now once again enjoys pride of place in Shaxi's market square, a site of tourist visitation fronted by two imposing demonic "guardian king" statues (pictures forthcoming, if I ever remember my Flickr password).
I did have some much needed decompression time in Kunming, during which time I thought a lot about cultural heritage preservation. As an Art History/Archaeology double major, I study aesthetic objects in their ancient and modern contexts. Since I've been in China, I've realized that I am very interested in the contemporary uses that such objects are put to, the various "agencies" they reflect. China is development-hungry, and in most places where the Cultural Revolution did not totally destroy ancient art and architecture, these are being restored mainly to serve the purpose of attracting domestic and international tourists. In the interviews I've conducted with government officials and the head of the Jianchuan County Cultural Relic Preservation Institute, there has been no distinction made between "cultural relics" and "cultural heritage." Both are used to refer to the materials left from a history that is distant not only in terms of the time that has passed, but also the ideological turns that have made the Four Olds of Chinese antiquity an object to be destroyed for the Communists and an object to be developed by contemporary entrepreneurs intent on collecting tourist cash. Little attention is payed to the indigenous populations whose history this is, the minorities and rural people who have a direct lineal connection to these cultural artifacts but who are being displaced by the business-savvy urban immigrants who have swooped in on towns such as Shaxi, attracted by the economic prospects of development and at best only marginally interested in the cultural ramifications of heritage revitalization. I came to Shaxi two days ago, and I am in fact writing this on a laptop borrowed from Allen, a Chengdu native whose English skills were honed in Switzerland and whose bar in the market square is only the most recent link in the chain of non-Shaxi, non-Bai development of the town.
So that's where I am and what I'm doing. There is one other American here, a student on my program who is studying traditional Bai medicine (the Bai ethnic minority composes the majority of Shaxi's very poor rice farmers). Last night in this remote farm town we ate Thanksgiving dinner with our Chinese friend Nancy, a Frenchman, an Italian, a Hong Kong banker and a Taiwanese hotel owner. Afterwards, we enjoyed fine Chilean wine with a group of Swiss delegates and an Indian civil engineer who's been working in Zurich for five years. That's globalization.
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
"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
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
Monday, October 08, 2007
Never sleep
Major update planned right now, let's see how far I can get.
Wednesday before last after class I met a BU student named Chris Rosenkrans with whom I've been emailing and who also happens to be studying in and around Kunming for the semester. He's a fellow undergraduate but he is currently undertaking a 5-year BA/MA thesis project that has had him researching in East Asia, C. and South America, Africa, and the Middle East; I'm envious of the clarity of vision that has allowed him to form such an ambitious project at this early age and I hope to take a page out of his book in the future. I met him at the anthropology museum of Yunnan University (the megalithic structure across the street from my more unassuming institution, Yunnan National Minorities University, aka MingDa), where he and a grad. student at Yunnan U (YunDa) were in turn meeting with a Professor Chen of the visual anthropology department. Chris interviewed Chen Laoshi about the Chinese Hui minority of Muslim traders as this is the topic of his research here. I also spoke with the Professor, asking him more general questions about the anthropological field work conducted by YunDa. I was intrigued by pictures of various ethnic minorities on the walls surrounding his office, particularly by images of the Wa minority, a transnational Burmese/Chinese group who in the past have been infamous for head-hunting, drug smuggling, and performing elaborate dance rituals involving gigantic drums made of hollowed-out tree trunks. My personal research interest at the moment is SW China's drum culture, including the ancient bronze drums (oldest in China) of the Dian culture that inhabited Kunming and surrounding area at the turn of the first millenium AD as well as the contemporary cultural significance attached to drums by the Wa, Dai, and Jinuo ethnic minority groups. This topic will likely comprise the independent study project I'll undertake in November. The Wa are rumored to have the world's largest drum in a village in Southwestern Yunnan, so I'm already planning a pilgrimage there. But more on this (way) later.
Chen Laoshi told me of a weekly film screening at YunDa on Wednesday nights, so that evening at 7:30 I went with some of my American classmates to check it out. We saw two short films made by Yunnan Arts University students. The first was a very "modern" stop-motion clay animation short dealing with the pressures that academic institutions place on young people; the youth were represented by amorphous clay androgynes who, fed up with school, run away to the city and encounter a Buddhist-looking statue bearing two kinds of fruit (a moment of comic relief came when the first intrepid sexless being ate both types of fruit, grew female and male genitalia simultaneously, then bid goodbye to his/her friends, following a sign pointing the way to Thailand; the four remaining clay blobs became one or the other sex and thus a suitable harmony was achieved). The second film was an amateur but charming and very touching documentary about a vivacious grandmother. I didn't understand much of the dialogue (in the films or subsequent short talks given by the filmmakers) but I enjoyed watching, and was grateful for my first real taste of a contemporary artistic community in Kunming.
On Thursday (9/27) morning we visited a drug clinic located in the Western Hills about 45 minutes outside of Kunming. This trip was of great interest to me as I've had several friends in similar institutions at home and one who recently died of an overdose. Overall the facility and treatment methods didn't seem too different from those in the U.S. People charged with drug possession and abuse in China must serve a mandatory interrment in the center, and many choose afterwards to live on-site, where they work and learn professional skills. The most interesting aspect of the clinic was that it incorporates a scientific research laboratory where alternatives to heavy narcotics are developed. Several years ago the lab came out with a pill they call the "June 26th Capsule"--the formula consists entirely of specially treated Chinese Traditional Medicinal (TCM) herbs. The capsule is non-addictive and has proven so effective in combatting remission cravings that the clinic has ceased to use Methadone or any other dependence-forming substances in their treatment. The doctor who gave us our lecture said that the June 26th Capsule is now being used in many drug rehabilitation centers nation-wide. I wonder how much of this is scientific fact and how much is propaganda; I'm very intrigued by the prospect, however, of an herbal treatment for hard-drug addiction, and would be curious to track its success in China over the next few years. Such a solution would be a huge breakthrough in the States, where heroin addiction often merely gives way to an equally nefarious dependence on Methadone and painkillers...
On Sunday (9/30) my new friend Marianna and I took a plane to Jinghong, the primary (basically the only) urban center in the southern Yunnan prefecture of Xishuangbanna. We had a week off, as did the majority of the nation, to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China by Mao Zedong on Oct. 1, 1949. We didn't do much celebrating: on the 1st we found ourselves in a dusty village called Mandian, where we stayed in a local Dai minority guesthouse and trekked through the jungle to an unpolluted and thankfully uninhabited waterfall. Banna is densely tropical, a completely different ecological and cultural environment from the more cosmopolitan Kunming. We experienced the immense ecological diversity in Mandian and at Sanchahe Nature Reserve, a nationally protected park famous for housing about 150 wild elephants. We didn't see any of these, but we did "experience" the tropics here, hiked around the bush bordering a small tributary of the Mekong river, picked small leeches off ourselves (no socks, bad idea) and declined to have ourselves photographed with muzzled bears and lizards. In busing around the region throughout the week I noted that most of the environment has been transformed by China's recent economic boom: in most places the giant, broad-leafed arborescent flora has been displaced by the far more profitable rubber tree, now a major force in the Banna economy. We also visited a tea plantation in a small village called Nanluoshan, about 20 km west of Jinghong. Yunnan is the only region in the world that produces Pu'er, an earthy black tea that is very popular (and given its rarity, expensive) in China.
For me, the highlight of the trip was an excursion we made to the town of Damenglong. To get there we rode a bus on an extremely worn-out, decrepit dirt road 4 hours south. Damenglong is only a few kilometers away from the Burmese border so that added an extra dimension to the already ethnically diverse character of Southwestern Chinese village culture. In Damenglong and the neighboring hamlet of Man Fei Long (a 2km hike away) we visited several Buddhist pagodas, complete with statues of the reclining Sakyamuni and overlarge footprints left from a mythohistorical visit the Buddha himself made to Xishuangbanna somewhere around 500 B.C. It was interesting to note the differences in Buddhist practice here: in Banna, Dai and Bulang peoples practice Theravada Buddhism, a form of the faith that predates the Mahayana school that predominates in China. Indeed, Damenglong had the cultural feel of Southeast asia: almost every sign in the town was in Dai characters, closely related to the Thai language, and some of the people we encountered didn't even speak Mandarin Chinese (virtually no one spoke English). I valued this short visit not only because it allowed me to grasp party of Yunnan's diversity, but also because I came at a time when Damenglong and the surrounding region are in transition. The atrocious road in and out of town is currently being converted into a modern superhighway that will connect China, Burma, and Thailand, an infrastructural development that will undoubtedly precipitate irrevocable socioeconomic changes in the town and the region as a whole. I wouldn't be surprised if the next time I'm in Damenglong I encounter, rather than a refreshing void of English-speakers, a battery of backpackers freshly arrived from Bangkok, taking a brief respite before seeking the greener pastures of Northwestern Yunnan.
Marianna and I arrived back in Kunming at around 1:00 am on Monday (10/9) morning, and as we were U-locked out of our dorm until 6, we killed the early morning hours at a (speaking of irrevocable socioeconomic changes) 24-hour McDonald's. Caught a few hours of shuteye then jumped back into the day, writing my paper on Banna (dwelling mostly on my disenchantment at the ecological degradation wrought by economic expansion and the gross commoditization of "ethnic" culture I witnessed at Sanchahe and a Sunday morning market in the town of Menghun) and packing in preparation for leaving the dorm. Yesterday afternoon I met Mrs. Shen, an English teacher at Kunming College of Science and Engineering and the homestay mother with whom I'll be living and sharing all my meals for the next two weeks. I grabbed my bags, the small Han drum I picked up on a semi-drunken mission to a local music store, and my SIT-loaned bicycle and headed for my new home, already slightly nostalgic for the freedom of MingDa dorm life.
On to the next chapter: badminton with my new Chinese little bro, increased isolation from the comforting retinue of American English-speakers I've enjoyed thus far, a tighter curfew, and the anticipated charms and pitfalls of receiving hospitality CHINESE STYLE.
Zaijian (later),
Jsh
Wednesday before last after class I met a BU student named Chris Rosenkrans with whom I've been emailing and who also happens to be studying in and around Kunming for the semester. He's a fellow undergraduate but he is currently undertaking a 5-year BA/MA thesis project that has had him researching in East Asia, C. and South America, Africa, and the Middle East; I'm envious of the clarity of vision that has allowed him to form such an ambitious project at this early age and I hope to take a page out of his book in the future. I met him at the anthropology museum of Yunnan University (the megalithic structure across the street from my more unassuming institution, Yunnan National Minorities University, aka MingDa), where he and a grad. student at Yunnan U (YunDa) were in turn meeting with a Professor Chen of the visual anthropology department. Chris interviewed Chen Laoshi about the Chinese Hui minority of Muslim traders as this is the topic of his research here. I also spoke with the Professor, asking him more general questions about the anthropological field work conducted by YunDa. I was intrigued by pictures of various ethnic minorities on the walls surrounding his office, particularly by images of the Wa minority, a transnational Burmese/Chinese group who in the past have been infamous for head-hunting, drug smuggling, and performing elaborate dance rituals involving gigantic drums made of hollowed-out tree trunks. My personal research interest at the moment is SW China's drum culture, including the ancient bronze drums (oldest in China) of the Dian culture that inhabited Kunming and surrounding area at the turn of the first millenium AD as well as the contemporary cultural significance attached to drums by the Wa, Dai, and Jinuo ethnic minority groups. This topic will likely comprise the independent study project I'll undertake in November. The Wa are rumored to have the world's largest drum in a village in Southwestern Yunnan, so I'm already planning a pilgrimage there. But more on this (way) later.
Chen Laoshi told me of a weekly film screening at YunDa on Wednesday nights, so that evening at 7:30 I went with some of my American classmates to check it out. We saw two short films made by Yunnan Arts University students. The first was a very "modern" stop-motion clay animation short dealing with the pressures that academic institutions place on young people; the youth were represented by amorphous clay androgynes who, fed up with school, run away to the city and encounter a Buddhist-looking statue bearing two kinds of fruit (a moment of comic relief came when the first intrepid sexless being ate both types of fruit, grew female and male genitalia simultaneously, then bid goodbye to his/her friends, following a sign pointing the way to Thailand; the four remaining clay blobs became one or the other sex and thus a suitable harmony was achieved). The second film was an amateur but charming and very touching documentary about a vivacious grandmother. I didn't understand much of the dialogue (in the films or subsequent short talks given by the filmmakers) but I enjoyed watching, and was grateful for my first real taste of a contemporary artistic community in Kunming.
On Thursday (9/27) morning we visited a drug clinic located in the Western Hills about 45 minutes outside of Kunming. This trip was of great interest to me as I've had several friends in similar institutions at home and one who recently died of an overdose. Overall the facility and treatment methods didn't seem too different from those in the U.S. People charged with drug possession and abuse in China must serve a mandatory interrment in the center, and many choose afterwards to live on-site, where they work and learn professional skills. The most interesting aspect of the clinic was that it incorporates a scientific research laboratory where alternatives to heavy narcotics are developed. Several years ago the lab came out with a pill they call the "June 26th Capsule"--the formula consists entirely of specially treated Chinese Traditional Medicinal (TCM) herbs. The capsule is non-addictive and has proven so effective in combatting remission cravings that the clinic has ceased to use Methadone or any other dependence-forming substances in their treatment. The doctor who gave us our lecture said that the June 26th Capsule is now being used in many drug rehabilitation centers nation-wide. I wonder how much of this is scientific fact and how much is propaganda; I'm very intrigued by the prospect, however, of an herbal treatment for hard-drug addiction, and would be curious to track its success in China over the next few years. Such a solution would be a huge breakthrough in the States, where heroin addiction often merely gives way to an equally nefarious dependence on Methadone and painkillers...
On Sunday (9/30) my new friend Marianna and I took a plane to Jinghong, the primary (basically the only) urban center in the southern Yunnan prefecture of Xishuangbanna. We had a week off, as did the majority of the nation, to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China by Mao Zedong on Oct. 1, 1949. We didn't do much celebrating: on the 1st we found ourselves in a dusty village called Mandian, where we stayed in a local Dai minority guesthouse and trekked through the jungle to an unpolluted and thankfully uninhabited waterfall. Banna is densely tropical, a completely different ecological and cultural environment from the more cosmopolitan Kunming. We experienced the immense ecological diversity in Mandian and at Sanchahe Nature Reserve, a nationally protected park famous for housing about 150 wild elephants. We didn't see any of these, but we did "experience" the tropics here, hiked around the bush bordering a small tributary of the Mekong river, picked small leeches off ourselves (no socks, bad idea) and declined to have ourselves photographed with muzzled bears and lizards. In busing around the region throughout the week I noted that most of the environment has been transformed by China's recent economic boom: in most places the giant, broad-leafed arborescent flora has been displaced by the far more profitable rubber tree, now a major force in the Banna economy. We also visited a tea plantation in a small village called Nanluoshan, about 20 km west of Jinghong. Yunnan is the only region in the world that produces Pu'er, an earthy black tea that is very popular (and given its rarity, expensive) in China.
For me, the highlight of the trip was an excursion we made to the town of Damenglong. To get there we rode a bus on an extremely worn-out, decrepit dirt road 4 hours south. Damenglong is only a few kilometers away from the Burmese border so that added an extra dimension to the already ethnically diverse character of Southwestern Chinese village culture. In Damenglong and the neighboring hamlet of Man Fei Long (a 2km hike away) we visited several Buddhist pagodas, complete with statues of the reclining Sakyamuni and overlarge footprints left from a mythohistorical visit the Buddha himself made to Xishuangbanna somewhere around 500 B.C. It was interesting to note the differences in Buddhist practice here: in Banna, Dai and Bulang peoples practice Theravada Buddhism, a form of the faith that predates the Mahayana school that predominates in China. Indeed, Damenglong had the cultural feel of Southeast asia: almost every sign in the town was in Dai characters, closely related to the Thai language, and some of the people we encountered didn't even speak Mandarin Chinese (virtually no one spoke English). I valued this short visit not only because it allowed me to grasp party of Yunnan's diversity, but also because I came at a time when Damenglong and the surrounding region are in transition. The atrocious road in and out of town is currently being converted into a modern superhighway that will connect China, Burma, and Thailand, an infrastructural development that will undoubtedly precipitate irrevocable socioeconomic changes in the town and the region as a whole. I wouldn't be surprised if the next time I'm in Damenglong I encounter, rather than a refreshing void of English-speakers, a battery of backpackers freshly arrived from Bangkok, taking a brief respite before seeking the greener pastures of Northwestern Yunnan.
Marianna and I arrived back in Kunming at around 1:00 am on Monday (10/9) morning, and as we were U-locked out of our dorm until 6, we killed the early morning hours at a (speaking of irrevocable socioeconomic changes) 24-hour McDonald's. Caught a few hours of shuteye then jumped back into the day, writing my paper on Banna (dwelling mostly on my disenchantment at the ecological degradation wrought by economic expansion and the gross commoditization of "ethnic" culture I witnessed at Sanchahe and a Sunday morning market in the town of Menghun) and packing in preparation for leaving the dorm. Yesterday afternoon I met Mrs. Shen, an English teacher at Kunming College of Science and Engineering and the homestay mother with whom I'll be living and sharing all my meals for the next two weeks. I grabbed my bags, the small Han drum I picked up on a semi-drunken mission to a local music store, and my SIT-loaned bicycle and headed for my new home, already slightly nostalgic for the freedom of MingDa dorm life.
On to the next chapter: badminton with my new Chinese little bro, increased isolation from the comforting retinue of American English-speakers I've enjoyed thus far, a tighter curfew, and the anticipated charms and pitfalls of receiving hospitality CHINESE STYLE.
Zaijian (later),
Jsh
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
The Daily Grind
It occurs to me I've been in China for almost a month and I've yet to write what I'm doing here and why I'm doing it. The truth is I'm not 100% sure of this even now but nonetheless here's some background info on my daily and what exactly it is I'm learning (in & out of class).
Though we keep pretty busy with small field trips and longer overnight excursions, I've settled into a more or less solid routine. Monday-Friday I have an "intensive" Mandarin class from 8-12, with a 30-minute taiji break thrown in for balance (pun). I use quotation marks around -intensive- because unlike similar programs in Beijing and Shanghai, we students are not forced to take a "language pledge" that precludes us from speaking English to fellow Americans. In this sense the language aspect of the program is less rigorous than other immersion programs. Rather the focus is on "experiential learning," a seemingly paradoxical concept uniting academic education and practical experience. So as we learn how to introduce ourselves, we're assigned to make friends. We learn how to order food, our homework is to dine alone. Etc.
The other aspect of the curriculum (for now) is a series of seminars addressing contemporary Chinese issues. Our first seminar was on Chinese history and religion-- thus the copious temple visits. Chinese history is one of the most absurdly expansive topics one might try to pack into a 2-week seminar, and our focus was more on modern and contemporary Chinese history than the earlier part of the multimillenial span Chinese culture enjoys. Our current seminar is on "social issues and humanities": we've gotten recent lectures on AIDS, family planning policies, traditional Chinese medicine, and the Chinese economy. Once again all monstrous topics condensed into (dense) 2-hr presentations. I've learned a lot obviously, but the main thing I've taken away from these seminar lectures is the unfathomable grandiosity in scale on which all social issues operate in China. The apparent contradictions not only from lecture to lecture (e.g. the disparity between a lecture on the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution vs. this Monday's lecture on family values when the 1950s-80s were characterized as a period of "stable happiness") but also WITHIN lectures makes each topic as unruly and difficult to grasp as it is fascinating and worthy of careful consideration.
China's social policies are still pretty staunchly relegated by an authoritarian government, but I'm surprised at how logical and practical some of their solutions to major social problems are. For instance you've probably heard of the "one family, one child" policy that prohibits a family from having more than one child except in special circumstances. Though this policy may bring to mind horror stories of forced sterilization, it must also be regarded as one of the only solutions to what could prove to be a major social and ecological hazard not only for China but also neighborhing countries, and eventually the rest of the world. The policies have become more lenient over the years, but through incentive programs I believe China is effectively addressing this critical issue. I'm also impressed at how China is dealing with its growing HIV/AIDS epidemic. Yesterday we received a lecture from a representative of an NGO called Family Health International; as Yunnan province is one of China's worst in terms of HIV/AIDS cases, she spoke specifically to the programs her institution is implementing in the region to address the spread of the virus. FHI gives clean needles to injected drug users; conducts meetings discussing the possible business advantages of protected sex with female sex works; and sets up information stations in public bathrooms and tea houses frequented by homosexual men. It's ironic (and really kind of tragic) that in a country like China where drug use is more harshly punished, prostitution is completely illegal and barely even acknowledged to exist by the government, and homosexuality is more roundly stigmatized, organizations like FHI are actively pursuing progressive means of HIV/AIDS prevention that are not really (or at least not widely) considered in the States.
Of course experiential learning means that every waking second is technically part of the curriculum. This past weekend we did an overnight at Stone Forest, a group of ancient (geologically speaking) clusters of sharp, fossilized rocks that once thrived as coral beneath a long gone ocean. It was cool to walk around during the day, I climbed some steep staircases and crossed some intense Indiana Jones-style stone bridges (none of which would pass US safety regulations) to get to a crowded but cool peak affording a nice view of neighboring mini-"forests". I went out again at night with a few friends, it was creepy seeing the shapes and shadows of the rocks by moonlight--definitely must have been an enchanted, ritually efficacious place in ancient (anthropologically speaking) times. We are one of the last groups to enjoy such an experience: Stone Forest has recently attained UNESCO world heritage site status, so in a few months all of the hotels in the vicinity will come down, presumably to make room for more of the overtly manicured "nature" that already characterizes the spot.
So that's WHAT I've been doing. WHY may take some more time to articulate. In the mean time, here's some other things to expect in the future:
-THE DAILY BREAD: I review the several foods I eat and love and pay next to nothing for
-Q&A: I answer questions about art, youth culture, drug smuggling, the weather, et al
-NOTHING FOR A WHILE... on Sunday I take off for Xishuangbanna, the subtropical southern region of Yunnan, where I'll have one week off to celebrate the 58th anniversary of the founding of the PRC, make field recordings of ethnic minority drummings, trek to sparsely populated jungle villages, peek over the Myanmar/Laos borders (shoutout to protesting monks), eat fried river moss, and of course do NOTHING FOR A WHILE.
-Josh
Though we keep pretty busy with small field trips and longer overnight excursions, I've settled into a more or less solid routine. Monday-Friday I have an "intensive" Mandarin class from 8-12, with a 30-minute taiji break thrown in for balance (pun). I use quotation marks around -intensive- because unlike similar programs in Beijing and Shanghai, we students are not forced to take a "language pledge" that precludes us from speaking English to fellow Americans. In this sense the language aspect of the program is less rigorous than other immersion programs. Rather the focus is on "experiential learning," a seemingly paradoxical concept uniting academic education and practical experience. So as we learn how to introduce ourselves, we're assigned to make friends. We learn how to order food, our homework is to dine alone. Etc.
The other aspect of the curriculum (for now) is a series of seminars addressing contemporary Chinese issues. Our first seminar was on Chinese history and religion-- thus the copious temple visits. Chinese history is one of the most absurdly expansive topics one might try to pack into a 2-week seminar, and our focus was more on modern and contemporary Chinese history than the earlier part of the multimillenial span Chinese culture enjoys. Our current seminar is on "social issues and humanities": we've gotten recent lectures on AIDS, family planning policies, traditional Chinese medicine, and the Chinese economy. Once again all monstrous topics condensed into (dense) 2-hr presentations. I've learned a lot obviously, but the main thing I've taken away from these seminar lectures is the unfathomable grandiosity in scale on which all social issues operate in China. The apparent contradictions not only from lecture to lecture (e.g. the disparity between a lecture on the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution vs. this Monday's lecture on family values when the 1950s-80s were characterized as a period of "stable happiness") but also WITHIN lectures makes each topic as unruly and difficult to grasp as it is fascinating and worthy of careful consideration.
China's social policies are still pretty staunchly relegated by an authoritarian government, but I'm surprised at how logical and practical some of their solutions to major social problems are. For instance you've probably heard of the "one family, one child" policy that prohibits a family from having more than one child except in special circumstances. Though this policy may bring to mind horror stories of forced sterilization, it must also be regarded as one of the only solutions to what could prove to be a major social and ecological hazard not only for China but also neighborhing countries, and eventually the rest of the world. The policies have become more lenient over the years, but through incentive programs I believe China is effectively addressing this critical issue. I'm also impressed at how China is dealing with its growing HIV/AIDS epidemic. Yesterday we received a lecture from a representative of an NGO called Family Health International; as Yunnan province is one of China's worst in terms of HIV/AIDS cases, she spoke specifically to the programs her institution is implementing in the region to address the spread of the virus. FHI gives clean needles to injected drug users; conducts meetings discussing the possible business advantages of protected sex with female sex works; and sets up information stations in public bathrooms and tea houses frequented by homosexual men. It's ironic (and really kind of tragic) that in a country like China where drug use is more harshly punished, prostitution is completely illegal and barely even acknowledged to exist by the government, and homosexuality is more roundly stigmatized, organizations like FHI are actively pursuing progressive means of HIV/AIDS prevention that are not really (or at least not widely) considered in the States.
Of course experiential learning means that every waking second is technically part of the curriculum. This past weekend we did an overnight at Stone Forest, a group of ancient (geologically speaking) clusters of sharp, fossilized rocks that once thrived as coral beneath a long gone ocean. It was cool to walk around during the day, I climbed some steep staircases and crossed some intense Indiana Jones-style stone bridges (none of which would pass US safety regulations) to get to a crowded but cool peak affording a nice view of neighboring mini-"forests". I went out again at night with a few friends, it was creepy seeing the shapes and shadows of the rocks by moonlight--definitely must have been an enchanted, ritually efficacious place in ancient (anthropologically speaking) times. We are one of the last groups to enjoy such an experience: Stone Forest has recently attained UNESCO world heritage site status, so in a few months all of the hotels in the vicinity will come down, presumably to make room for more of the overtly manicured "nature" that already characterizes the spot.
So that's WHAT I've been doing. WHY may take some more time to articulate. In the mean time, here's some other things to expect in the future:
-THE DAILY BREAD: I review the several foods I eat and love and pay next to nothing for
-Q&A: I answer questions about art, youth culture, drug smuggling, the weather, et al
-NOTHING FOR A WHILE... on Sunday I take off for Xishuangbanna, the subtropical southern region of Yunnan, where I'll have one week off to celebrate the 58th anniversary of the founding of the PRC, make field recordings of ethnic minority drummings, trek to sparsely populated jungle villages, peek over the Myanmar/Laos borders (shoutout to protesting monks), eat fried river moss, and of course do NOTHING FOR A WHILE.
-Josh
Saturday, September 15, 2007
"And I ate It Cause I'm so at It"
One day last year at Brighton Center's notorious Dragon Chef I received a fortune that read "Write the events of your life in a journal." I've never kept a regular journal in my life and I didn't take this to heart at the time but for some reason I've been compelled to write daily while I've been in China. It feels like a good thing to do and I think in retrospect I was just being lazy. Paradoxically, the daily dose of writing I get has made me less disposed to additionally sweat out a blog post in one of these packed, tea soaked internet cafes. But here I am and I'm just going to pop off some recent events and impressions kicking around my mind. (Also I apologize for any repetition as I can't read my previous posts, China has banned blog READING but evidently not blog writing.)
The day after I flew into Kunming we took a 2-day field trip to the smaller southern city of Tonghai. On our first full day there we visited a small village where old women with traditional bound feet performed a dance for us. I've seen pictures and read about foot-binding but to see these women in person--and to see them move so gracefully--was an intriguing and slightly repuslive experience. To think that these women endured such pain for the pleasure of their future husbands made me wonder if it hurt them still to dance in old age. But they seemed happy and represent the last vestiges of a culture where having 3-inch "golden lotus blossoms" (the traditional euphemism for expressing ideal foot size) is still a matter of great pride.
It was also in Tonghai that I climbed my first temple-filled mountain (see above). China is packed full of these. Being an fan of mountains, Buddhism, and exercise I'm very into these excursions. I went to a site in Kunming called "Golden Temple Scenic Spot" that was heavily touristed and so less appealing, but most of the temples are sparsely populated, serene, and mist-shrouded like exoticized accounts would lead you to believe. I've never been a practicing Buddhist so I wouldn't say I've been properly meditating but certainly walking around in such places has put me into a meditative state. Also the healthy amount of walking and fresh air (Yunnan is extremely underpolluted as China goes) I've been getting has facilitated a lot of introspection that spills over into writing and of course meandering blog posts.
Anyway another random highlight: we had dinner with some state officials in Tonghai and they encouraged (rather, enforced) us to drink with them, handing us shots of baijiu (rice liquor) and yelling "Gan bei!" which literally means "empty the glass" but in practice means "We're going to keep this up til you pass out." After a few gan beis I steeled myself up sufficiently to eat one of the sauteed wasps that had been passed around on a barely touched plate all night. Of course I'm vegan and wasp doesn't exactly meet the criteria for what I usually choose to eat but in the heat of the moment I decided that since I've been stung by one wasp I can eat one wasp. Kind of a selfish rule but now I think if I come across any fried scorpions four of them will go too. Otherwise I've found it very easy to avoid meat, dairy, and eggs. I've learned how to say "I don't eat meat, I eat vegetables" in Mandarin but I've yet to finesse "does this suspicious broth by chance come from mutton"? The food is great and very inexpensive (as are the 23 cent fake Nike socks with reverse swoops I'm wearing as I write this, incidentally), lots of fresh vegetables, leafy greens, tofu and bean-paste cakes. I haven't yet entered my homestay so I've been moderate my own food intake; I may need to stretch my stomach in preparation for the stubborn hospitality I've been told to expect.
The other day we received a lecture from Mr. Huang Cheng, an 88-year-old man from Kunming. This actually isn't the first lecture we've received from an octagenarian and like the venerable Professor Guo who lectured on Taiji, Mr. Cheng's English was perfect and his anecdotes confusing. He was to give us an oral history of his life, an interesting one as he was born the son of a powerful general and came of age at the beginning of the Mao era. He served as a translator for G.I.s in Japan during WWII and so valued the opportunity to "practice my English with young Americans once again." He was a jovial and humorous man, and he spent most of his lecture telling us stories that seemed only tangentially related to his own life. It was only after some direct questioning that we found out he was imprisoned for 19 years during the cultural revolution. This was because of his American affiliations and because he suggested openly that China should "pay more attention to technology." Some of our questions about his time in prison didn't translate well. He answered us by saying that we're too young to understand the desparation of China at this time. Perhaps this is true; I'm not in a position to question a man who was in prison for nearly as long as I've been alive on this point. But Mr. Cheng's talk reinforced the impression I've been getting of the incredible resilience of the Chinese spirit. I'm almost desensitized to the atrocities committed during the last 50 years in this country after reading and hearing about them so much but still the people seem indomitable, industrious, and content. How much of this is an inherent cultural characteristic and how much is the result of a seasoned state propaganda machine I have yet to discern. (Not likely to any time soon.)
That was all over the place, I'll try to make my next post more organized and interesting. I don't have the patience to put pictures here but I've managed to upload some onto my Flickr account, username is End Times. Hope you're all well and enjoying the Fall... I've been good about responding to email so don't hesitate to write if you have a minute.
-Josh
The day after I flew into Kunming we took a 2-day field trip to the smaller southern city of Tonghai. On our first full day there we visited a small village where old women with traditional bound feet performed a dance for us. I've seen pictures and read about foot-binding but to see these women in person--and to see them move so gracefully--was an intriguing and slightly repuslive experience. To think that these women endured such pain for the pleasure of their future husbands made me wonder if it hurt them still to dance in old age. But they seemed happy and represent the last vestiges of a culture where having 3-inch "golden lotus blossoms" (the traditional euphemism for expressing ideal foot size) is still a matter of great pride.
It was also in Tonghai that I climbed my first temple-filled mountain (see above). China is packed full of these. Being an fan of mountains, Buddhism, and exercise I'm very into these excursions. I went to a site in Kunming called "Golden Temple Scenic Spot" that was heavily touristed and so less appealing, but most of the temples are sparsely populated, serene, and mist-shrouded like exoticized accounts would lead you to believe. I've never been a practicing Buddhist so I wouldn't say I've been properly meditating but certainly walking around in such places has put me into a meditative state. Also the healthy amount of walking and fresh air (Yunnan is extremely underpolluted as China goes) I've been getting has facilitated a lot of introspection that spills over into writing and of course meandering blog posts.
Anyway another random highlight: we had dinner with some state officials in Tonghai and they encouraged (rather, enforced) us to drink with them, handing us shots of baijiu (rice liquor) and yelling "Gan bei!" which literally means "empty the glass" but in practice means "We're going to keep this up til you pass out." After a few gan beis I steeled myself up sufficiently to eat one of the sauteed wasps that had been passed around on a barely touched plate all night. Of course I'm vegan and wasp doesn't exactly meet the criteria for what I usually choose to eat but in the heat of the moment I decided that since I've been stung by one wasp I can eat one wasp. Kind of a selfish rule but now I think if I come across any fried scorpions four of them will go too. Otherwise I've found it very easy to avoid meat, dairy, and eggs. I've learned how to say "I don't eat meat, I eat vegetables" in Mandarin but I've yet to finesse "does this suspicious broth by chance come from mutton"? The food is great and very inexpensive (as are the 23 cent fake Nike socks with reverse swoops I'm wearing as I write this, incidentally), lots of fresh vegetables, leafy greens, tofu and bean-paste cakes. I haven't yet entered my homestay so I've been moderate my own food intake; I may need to stretch my stomach in preparation for the stubborn hospitality I've been told to expect.
The other day we received a lecture from Mr. Huang Cheng, an 88-year-old man from Kunming. This actually isn't the first lecture we've received from an octagenarian and like the venerable Professor Guo who lectured on Taiji, Mr. Cheng's English was perfect and his anecdotes confusing. He was to give us an oral history of his life, an interesting one as he was born the son of a powerful general and came of age at the beginning of the Mao era. He served as a translator for G.I.s in Japan during WWII and so valued the opportunity to "practice my English with young Americans once again." He was a jovial and humorous man, and he spent most of his lecture telling us stories that seemed only tangentially related to his own life. It was only after some direct questioning that we found out he was imprisoned for 19 years during the cultural revolution. This was because of his American affiliations and because he suggested openly that China should "pay more attention to technology." Some of our questions about his time in prison didn't translate well. He answered us by saying that we're too young to understand the desparation of China at this time. Perhaps this is true; I'm not in a position to question a man who was in prison for nearly as long as I've been alive on this point. But Mr. Cheng's talk reinforced the impression I've been getting of the incredible resilience of the Chinese spirit. I'm almost desensitized to the atrocities committed during the last 50 years in this country after reading and hearing about them so much but still the people seem indomitable, industrious, and content. How much of this is an inherent cultural characteristic and how much is the result of a seasoned state propaganda machine I have yet to discern. (Not likely to any time soon.)
That was all over the place, I'll try to make my next post more organized and interesting. I don't have the patience to put pictures here but I've managed to upload some onto my Flickr account, username is End Times. Hope you're all well and enjoying the Fall... I've been good about responding to email so don't hesitate to write if you have a minute.
-Josh
Thursday, September 06, 2007
फ़ीट ओं थे ground
OK I'm not sure how long I'm going to be here at this internet cafe, or what language this computer automatically translated my post title into (Sanskrit? go figure; says "Feet on the ground" if you're not Matt Lundin), but here is a quick update after 3 days that have felt like a week.
I flew into Kunming via Hong Kong on September third (Sept. 2 was lost in the Pacific) but already on the 4th we took off for a short orientation field trip to the smaller town of Tonghai in south Yunnan. The town was very nice and rustic. The highlight was a trip to Xiushan Mountain, which had about a dozen Daoist/Buddhist temples built over the last 4 dynasties. I broke off from the group and did most of the climb by myself, stopping in various temples to light incense, toss coins, and exchange the three phrases of conversational Mandarin I've managed to pick up so far (Hello! Thanks! Goodbye!). The largest temple (and my favorite) was near the top of the mountain. "Emerging Lotus Temple" had a wide courtyard with large Buddhist paintings in the middle and three gargantuan golden Sakyamuni statues toward the back in a large hall. There was also a smaller tower that contained the largest bell in Tonghai; after negotiating a donation of 2 quai (<50cents) and taking off my shoes I climbed to the top of the tower and struck the bell very lightly so as not to offend anyone (it will ring for 3 minutes if you really bash it). I tried to get a sound recording of it on my camera but I'm not sure if that came out. As soon as I leave here I'll be looking for a better audio solution; I've already heard so many wonderful musical and non- sounds that I want to record and reflect on later, and perhaps incorporate into my own musical output.
I greatly valued my solo time on the mountain but it really drove home how difficult it will be to travel and experience things on my own here. I've already been able to pick up some basic phrases but I still rely heavily on those with more Chinese knowledge to let me know what's going on. I look forward to the challenge but I fear that I won't be able to communicate in any real depth with native Chinese. But I've taken the plunge and I'm not looking back. Right now I'm living in a dorm on the campus of Yunnan Nationalities University, so hopefully I will start to make some local friends. I also saw a billboard for "Kunming Museum of Contemporaneity Art" so that will be a good mission. We're getting bikes soon and I look forward to exploring on wheels.
There's so much more to say but I can't even sort through it all now. I'm keeping a journal so the minute details of my experience are there and may filter out over the next few months. Also I've been taking a ton of pictures so hopefully I can throw those on here soon. Until then please substitute stock photo of "pensive wanderer on lonely mountain peak" in your mind's eye. Failing that, "confused foreigner looking lost."
-JOSH
I flew into Kunming via Hong Kong on September third (Sept. 2 was lost in the Pacific) but already on the 4th we took off for a short orientation field trip to the smaller town of Tonghai in south Yunnan. The town was very nice and rustic. The highlight was a trip to Xiushan Mountain, which had about a dozen Daoist/Buddhist temples built over the last 4 dynasties. I broke off from the group and did most of the climb by myself, stopping in various temples to light incense, toss coins, and exchange the three phrases of conversational Mandarin I've managed to pick up so far (Hello! Thanks! Goodbye!). The largest temple (and my favorite) was near the top of the mountain. "Emerging Lotus Temple" had a wide courtyard with large Buddhist paintings in the middle and three gargantuan golden Sakyamuni statues toward the back in a large hall. There was also a smaller tower that contained the largest bell in Tonghai; after negotiating a donation of 2 quai (<50cents) and taking off my shoes I climbed to the top of the tower and struck the bell very lightly so as not to offend anyone (it will ring for 3 minutes if you really bash it). I tried to get a sound recording of it on my camera but I'm not sure if that came out. As soon as I leave here I'll be looking for a better audio solution; I've already heard so many wonderful musical and non- sounds that I want to record and reflect on later, and perhaps incorporate into my own musical output.
I greatly valued my solo time on the mountain but it really drove home how difficult it will be to travel and experience things on my own here. I've already been able to pick up some basic phrases but I still rely heavily on those with more Chinese knowledge to let me know what's going on. I look forward to the challenge but I fear that I won't be able to communicate in any real depth with native Chinese. But I've taken the plunge and I'm not looking back. Right now I'm living in a dorm on the campus of Yunnan Nationalities University, so hopefully I will start to make some local friends. I also saw a billboard for "Kunming Museum of Contemporaneity Art" so that will be a good mission. We're getting bikes soon and I look forward to exploring on wheels.
There's so much more to say but I can't even sort through it all now. I'm keeping a journal so the minute details of my experience are there and may filter out over the next few months. Also I've been taking a ton of pictures so hopefully I can throw those on here soon. Until then please substitute stock photo of "pensive wanderer on lonely mountain peak" in your mind's eye. Failing that, "confused foreigner looking lost."
-JOSH
Saturday, September 01, 2007
Lunar phase shift
Above is the full moon of August 27, 2007, cultural signal of auspicious beginnings for Native Americans who call it the Green Corn Moon, and incidentally also of significance for students of solar/lunar conflict as this night also saw a total lunar eclipse (though I didn't witness this due to clouds and encroaching city lights). If you've seen this blog before you'll be aware of the sparse modifications and frequent regenerations it's undergone over the years. Previous posts are still available to anyone who can remember a snatch of words with which to search for them (alternately some can be found on paper here).
This most recent rebirth has taken place so I can use this as a part-time travelogue during my forthcoming 3.5(+?) month trip to China. I'll be based in Kunming for the majority of this time, but will also travel extensively around Yunnan province and in the later part of this year will visit Xi'an, Beijing, and other as of yet undecided locales. Check in to see if I make good on my promise to keep the world apace of my linguistic, philosophical, gastronomic (et al) struggles through a culture and land I've heretofore idly dreamt about and into which I am now (it is just this moment occurring to me) about to plunge headfirst.
see you on the other side
Josh
OUT
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