The TravelJen Blog

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been gathering written examples of Chinglish. And good thing, too, as Beijing is trying to eliminate the fun from its streets—here we go again with this phrase—in anticipation of the 2008 Olympics.

That’s a shame, because Chinglish is excellent. Like any number of mating languages that over time may result in a widely used patois and over a longer period of time an official language, Chlnglish reveals possibilities in my native tongue that have never occurred to me. Familiar words refracted by a different linguistic prism emerge tilted, angled, showing an unfamiliar face. It’s like learning the key to the psyche of someone you thought you knew intimately. It makes you reconsider your assumptions. It’s revelatory. It’s delightful. And sometimes, of course, it’s just hilarious.

Here’s a poem I wrote from Chinglish that I’ve found resonant for one reason or another. Aside from a few articles and one “you,” I haven’t added anything. I’ve just—assembled.

Conveniently, it’s free verse, so spare me any lectures about meter. But do let me know what you think. Title suggestions welcome!

***

Take attention
the tasty is coming!

Are you sniveling?
No smorking!

Beautiful white
beautiful armor
protects skin
sends the technical inspector
for general cuts
and high-level cuts
assuredly mixed.

“Overthrow the wealth!”
—the pamphlet start of our undertaking
the vicissitudes of dynasties.

The restroom is now suspended.

Disem-
bark
don’t stay!

Please
be ready for it

constant hot showers
sensation
in the everbright fun land
in the swingbar leisure zone

be for time.

You
—a person so reside—
—a stopcock—
—a beast face—
are my top-grade nutlet.

I just returned to Lijiang, in the northwest of China’s Yunnan province, after a 50-kilometer, three-day solo hike through—actually, mostly above—the deepest canyon in the world: Tiger Leaping Gorge.

This is one of the many mountainsides from which you can plummet to your demise at any moment. Who knew, but defying the icy scythe of death makes you grin.

The hike was, in a word, amazing. I ruminated over lots of Big Thoughts, was wowed by lots of Big Views, and was quieted by lots of Big Stars.

I’m still processing it. So in the meantime, here’s some fabulous filler: the all-animal edition of one-offs. In honor of the legendary tiger whose nimble jump gave the gorge its name, revel in the nonhuman cuteness. Feel free to anthropomorphize. I did.

Plus, at the end there’s a new feature—an audio file!

***

Near the Flower and Bird Market in Kunming, a major draw in Yunnan’s capital city, I came across a much less official animal shop, which I’m calling Puppy and Kitten Alley.

A collie mix, I think.

It took me an hour to walk 30 feet. I had to pet every creature, sticking my fingers through the cages to let little wet mouths nibble on my fingertips.

Not all of the animals were in cages. They seemed to be casually but not callously treated. But the kittens were too young to be separated from mom, and cried piteously for her. Or me. Or anyone to take them out of their mean little prisons.

With nowhere to go and nothing to do, some slept off the long wait for a new home.

Much freer was this duck in Kunming’s CuiHu, or Green Lake, about a mile north of the pet alley. It seemed pretty cheerful in the sunshine that emerged after a brief, mellow rain.

Six hours north, in Lijiang, I found this puppy already on the job, guarding some Naxi tchotchke shop. He has a serious countenance, but don’t let that fool you—his butt still got all happy-wriggly when I cooed at him and scratched him between the ears.

I did not pet this cow, which was one of the first sites I encountered when I began to hike the trail through Tiger Leaping Gorge.

Nor did I snuggle these high-altitude bees hungry for nectar some 3,000 meters above sea level.

Ditto on the goats, which were walking the trail sans herder.

Be glad this is a distant shot. Goats are cute from the front. They have nubbly little horns and horizontal pupils like minus signs made with a thick black marker. But from the back, goats are appalling. Whatever horrors your imagination can conjure up about the rear of this creature, double it and then gag a little.

Along the first part of the trail, touts wait with mules for tired trekkers to give up the hike and get hauled to the top.

Few hikers take the ride. Maybe that’s why this mule and his trio of chocolate-colored pals were, like the goats, walking the trail without any human tenders.

It was just them, the bells, and me. Here’s what it sounded like when I tried to pass them:

Mule Report

More from Tiger Leaping Gorge soon.

The people I speak with back home are listless and miserable, suffering through frigid air and snow, burdened by the morbidity that sets in when it seems like there will never be warmth or color—Christ, even hope—again. Thanks, February, you bastard!

Winter in Xi’an, in the Shaanxi province of north-central China, is no different. But here, the naturally gray winter sky, which is often foggy to boot, takes on a verdigris cast from the remarkable pollution.

I’ve never encountered everything like it. On Monday, the worst day, it was like being on another planet—one with an atmosphere that has an entirely different chemical makeup, and is warmed by a sun much less powerful than ours (which is like a C student—merely average). The sun was clearly shining somewhere, but the smog was so low to the earth that I was kicking through it. That day, I saw more people wearing surgical masks than on any other.

Here’s an example of the ogre-ugly light in Xi’an, taken at the Shaanxi Provincial History Museum (itself a great place to visit).

Truly a foul nimbus.

In this sort of environment, color becomes more than something that catches your eye. It becomes nourishment. Last February in Cairo, I saw lattice-climbing flowers whose fuchsia glow literally took my breath. I gasped. Tears blurred my eyes. Maybe it was simply jet lag (compounded by my tendency at the doddering old age of 34 to get quite teary when it comes to natural beauty). But I think that after months of monochromatic winter New York, I was being reminded of something within me that I had curled around protectively, something that would otherwise wither in the cold and darkness.

Such has been my relationship with both Xi’an’s skies and Xi’an’s bright colors. Humans have a large hand in both. Ostensibly I came here to see the Terracotta Warrior Army, which has been rendered by two millennia as drab as the dirt they’ve been buried in. Their colors have been stripped by time.

They’re no less remarkable for that, however.

I did take in my share of ancient sites—it’s hard not to in Xi’an, the imperial capital of China for nearly 2,000 years—and I also did two interviews. But mostly I wandered in modern Xi’an, which for all of its pollution is a pretty hopping city with many beautiful buildings and a 14th-century wall that encases the downtown area in 8.5 miles of 40-foot-tall brick and a now-shallow moat. Just amazing.

Here is the South Gate.

You can walk or bike atop the entire wall. For three hours I walked it with Leo Ye, an urban native and a freelance interpreter for the U.S. construction company Caterpillar, who proved to be my intrepid guide to all things Xi’an over the next few days. Leo has a pass to visit all the tourist sites in two provinces—Shaanxi and Yunnan, where I head next—which at 200 yuan for two years is a pretty good deal. I had to pay 10 yuan to enter, much as this couple probably did.

At 45 feet wide, the top of the wall is so roomy that you could drive three Hummers (or 84 regular-sized cars) side-by-side at the same time. Luckily those greedy monsters aren’t anywhere in Xi’an, though they apparently exist in Shaanxi; Leo told me that of the many shady mine owners in the province, the most extravagantly corrupt flaunts his ill-gotten wealth with four Hummers. Boo-yah, workers of the world. Suck it.

Instead, we saw displays in progress. The city was preparing for the Spring Festival—also known as the New Year—which begins February 17. Covered in glossy fabric or plastic and waiting for parts, the displays were gorgeous and freakish at once.

Xi’an is a now a city of seven million. In the Tang Dynasty (6th–9th centuries), it was one of the largest cities on the planet. Being one terminus of the Silk Road, Xi’an was open to foreign ideas and influence in a way that China purports to be today.

I’ve yet to see a face with a moustache in China, but perhaps this grooming feature will lead the way. It did in the Tang Dynasty.

“Do you see that one there?” Leo said, pointed to the figure of a fellow with the straight, mid-length ‘stache of central Asia, who was rendered kowtowing to a monk riding an elephant. “He’s a foreigner.”

“He looks Kazakh,” I said, though really he could just as likely be Turkmen or Uzbek.

“Yes! Right! Kazakh!” Leo agreed, pleased.

Workers in blue overalls were busy assembling or repairing the displays. Lots of musicians and dancers—

—flowers and animals—

—back-up flowers, because you can never have too many—

—and, of course, a sage.

In many parts of the world, spring is a sweet dream only achieved by surviving weeks more of unfortunate weather. But not in China. It’s spring. It’s the New Year. At least, that’s the promise.

So Happy New Year. Hope is on the way.

With this blog, I’m trying to tell stories with both words and images. But not everything fits into a story—or, sometimes, is its own tale. So here’s a new category: One-Offs. It will include images or words that might not fit somewhere else but that I like too much to abandon.

First off, some images from around Beijing.

St. Xavier’s hand from the courtyard of a cathedral on Xuanwumenwei Dajie.

Children are like beautiful flowers. They must be stopped at all costs.

Graffitti scratched into bamboo in Zhongshan Park, adjacent to the Forbidden City.

Faded glamour in the hutongs.

A pedestrian overpass in downtown Beijing.

All of Beijing seems to be under construction 24/7. I’ve heard the drills at midnight.

The Buffalo natives I know would say this sign is the very embodiment of looking for love in all the wrong places.

Join the military. Defend China. You know, as effectively as the Great Wall did. Ahem.

Old and new Beijing. Even the cars face opposite directions.

I have the best feng shui on Jiaozi Hutong.

You see, my room in the Jin An Bin Guan (Zen Hotel) looks south. Apparently, in feng shui, south is the most auspicious direction for your home to face. I had dinner with a Beijinger named Angela Wang last night who told me that homes in the city with a southern exposure cost a truly extortionist amount of money per square meter—the most expensive of any exposure.

Most of the people who live in the hutongs I can see from my room have neither southern exposures nor worries about the cost per square meter (well, not entirely—but more on that later).

The view from my room.

Hutongs are the narrow alleys and lanes formed by the one-story brick-and-mortar buildings traditional to Beijing since the 13th century, when Kublai Khan established a capital here. They weave in labyrinthian coils between those foot-wearying avenues on which I’ve taken so many death marches. They were built on an east-west line to capture that southern exposure—which, as Angela pointed out to me last night, at Beijing’s latitude guarantees sun in the winter and shade in the summer. They had inner courtyards for privacy and fresh air.

Early on, the hutongs surrounding the Forbidden City were where aristocrats had their quite swanky residences. The rest—the vast majority—housed regular folks. Now there are no hutongs left in the city center, which is dominated by highrises, and it’s only the poor who live in hutongs.

Electricity is sort of available. Plumbing isn’t. Public bathrooms are everywhere in the hutongs. As a New Yorker, my first reaction was that this was responsible urban planning in a density populated city. The people’s party had given the people a place to pee!

After a couple of days, though, I realized the preponderance of bathrooms probably indicated just the opposite: terrible urban planning coupled with jet-powered governmental malfeasance. The reason there are so many public bathrooms in the hutongs is that there are no private ones. That sure puts the “community” in “communism.”

One of the public bathrooms.

My ability to immerse myself in the hutongs stopped at the bathrooms. I dared not venture in.

I can’t find reliable numbers, but it’s safe to say most of the hutongs are gone. Hundreds left from what used to be thousands. The government pays people to leave the hutongs and resettle in the suburbs, where they might get that crazy newfangled indoor plumbing that’s all the rage with the kids these days. You can’t blame people for taking off. Then the hutongs are bulldozed and more modern housing put up in their place.

The hutong atmosphere is alternately crackling with action and centuries-old sleepy. Men seem to be quickly moving in and out of doorways at all times. Older men meander with their hands loosely clasped behind their backs. Old women supervise, telling everyone else what to do. Slumping teenagers watch TV. Children throw stuff or jump over things. Vendors of round coal bricks, sweet baked goods, meat, meat, and more meat, and other, more mysterious wares drive their carts through the alleys. Some call out what they’re selling, and the more prosperous blare a recording through a small yet powerful speaker. Bikes and mopeds weave through the on-foot. Laundered blankets and sheets hang drying in the sun. Skyscrapers pose icily in the distance. Crumbled piles of destroyed hutongs offer a warning—or a promise—just across the street.

North of the Forbidden City, some of the hutongs are successfully making the grade for next-generation tourism, which aims to be more B&B than backpacker, more coq au vin than chicken feet. Jiaozi Hutong, which is in the Xuanwu area in the southwest of Beijing, is just plain-old poor. I wonder if a very unusual doorway such as this—

—will be around in 10 years.

There’s a whole other Beijing I’m not showing you. It’s very neon, and very tall, and not very interesting. You can find this public face of Beijing anywhere. Try any Chinese media source, where you’ll also get a stupor-inducing Party-line spin about Biejing being a “world-class city.”

Sure, okay. But what the propaganda would like you to overlook is the fact that the world kind of sucks a lot. Most of the world is starving, violent, polluted, or diseased. So hell yeah, Bejiing is the world. So is New York. So is your hometown.

There is a hyperconsumerism to the New Beijing that’s fascinating—and just as expensive as any other international city—but in the end it’s too familar in ways I don’t like and too alien in others. I know overpriced city life. And I hate shopping.

The hutongs, on the other hand, are ostensibly exotic to my experience, and yet I feel easier there, even thought the language barrier is most extreme. People eat, they sleep, they sell things to one another, they ride their bikes, they yell at each other, they kiss their kids, they spit everywhere, they watch TV or me as I walk by. I point at things with a smile and a nod and a few Mandarin words and soon I have something to eat. Life is very essential here, in a way.

This isn’t my requisite “look at the poor but happy natives!” moment apparently required of the Western tourist abroad. At least I hope it isn’t. I’m not saying they’re happy. I’m just saying they’re there. Poor, but present, when Beijing would like you to believe otherwise. (So would D.C., Paris, or London.)

For some reason it makes me have a better understanding of the childhood of my mother and father, Eileen and Jim, who were both very poor. It makes me understand how if you can get the hell out, you stay the hell out at all costs, and perhaps you might even scorn those who don’t. After all, if it was impossible, you couldn’t have done it. Yet to speak of being born poor as just slight bump in the road—something that can be simply overcome with some good old-fashioned hard work—would make it seem that getting out had been easy. And you know how damned hard it was.

Some of the hutongs are relatively prosperous. Just south of Tian’anmen Square, in an area called Qianmen, I got a massage in a barber shop owned by this woman, Red, and her husband:

It’s an area that sees some foreigners because there are several hostels nearby. Places to check email or make cheap international calls abound. While her husband gave a hip young thing a buzzcut, Red gave me what was probably the most distracted massage I’ve ever received. But that’s because we were too busy talking. What she didn’t do for my muscles she did for my spirit.

Like many people I’ve spoken to, she wanted to know if it was difficult to get a visa to the U.S. I told her that’s what her countrymen had told me, so probably yes. Holding my leg in the air while she kneaded my calf, she considered the possibilities.

First she suggested that I should hire someone to clean my home because I am obviously too busy working and traveling to clean. And, you know, if I looked her way, she wouldn’t be upset. She laughed slyly. I laughed too. She then suggested I should open a beauty parlor, and if I needed some help, well, she and her husband just happened to have the experience to do me a square.

“You don’t have to do anything. You have everybody help you. You just own the business,” she said, her fingertips rotating against my temples. “I think this is good.”

She stood up, grabbed my arm, and began to shake it briskly. I answered that I didn’t have the money to start a business. She shrugged, unconvinced. Of course I had the money. I was American. She shook harder, perhaps trying to see if money might fall out of my very skin. “I think you can do this.”

I rolled my eyes. She laughed.

After my clothes were back on, I stayed to chat for another half hour with her and her husband, a trim guy who reminded me so much of someone back home, but I can’t figure out who. We played with Red’s Chinese-English pocket translator, trying to find the difference in the characters for “email” and “website.” They wished I were staying another night in Beijing so they could have me to their home for dinner. I wished I were too.

On the walk back to the Zen Hostel, I realized there was something about the hutongs that reminded me of Chiapas. I think it was a sort of Schrodinger’s Cat state of being that can belong to the architecture of poverty. Sometimes the decrepitude of a building hits a perfectly poised place between construction and destruction. In Chiapas, I had often been confused by a partial building buoyed by haphazard piles of bricks and painted a tropically cheery pool-blue, but was half undone in either direction. It kept its existential state undeclared. I would think, is this thing going up or coming down?

It’s much the same in Beijing, even though I know which direction the hutongs are headed. Even their shabby two-story brethren don’t have much of a chance:

My room in the Zen Hostel isn’t exactly swanky. For one thing, it’s freezing. At least the shower spits a boiling-hot stream that might originate from the bowels of hell. The TV has one English-language channel, which has taught me how truly soporific propaganda can be. The walls are astonishingly dirty in a Mickey Spillane sort of way. There is actually a full hand of four-inch-long finger smears of a brown-red substance about six inches northwest of the wall outlet. It’s the perfect distance from the bed for someone to lean out, making one last effort to escape their tormentor and get help—but instead collapse, vanquished.

Yet I have the water, the electricity, the heat, the ability to get the hell out whenever I want. And I also have that thing we Americans are always so willing to pay a premium for: my own space. That’s why I have the best feng shui on Jiaozi Hutong—because I can pay the per-square-meter cost for that southern exposure.

And so it has ever been, Mao’s Little Red Book or no.

A neighbor.