Emails from China 1 | 2 | 3

From: "Angie Eng" <angie_eng@hotmail.com>
To: mailing list
Subject: ENTER THE DRAGON
Date: Tue, 08 May 2001 02:28:31 -0400

ENTER THE DRAGON

Forewarned, I knew my being an ABC (American Born Chinese, 3rd/5th generation nonetheless), traveling as an interracial couple with my Caucasian partner, my inability to speak more than 3 words of Mandarin and being an American during the Bush administration and his quest to instigate WWIII against the largest communist state with the fastest growing economy and the largest population in the world, would jeopardize our welcome.


Bai festival, Dali, Yunan

First stop Nanning, newly developed; she sparkles like a Swiss-made town. Our accommodation simple, clean and friendly-all our preconceptions of dirty, rude, overpriced, backwards China negated by little Nanning. A rest in a park for sketching and people watching, quickly we became park entertainment when a group of Chinese men in navy’s and gray’s encircled us. A gentleman, who introduced himself as a worker from the Economic and Technical Development Zone of Nanning stroke up a conversation in his broken English. A nice welcome into "harsh" China, I emailed to a few friends who had been to China nearly 10 years ago. They had advised me, ‘Don't trust anyone!, ‘hygiene is atrocious!’, ‘the people mean and racist!’ Things had changed, so I thought. I spoke too quickly.

China: She is a mean, gritty, ethnocentric, shoddily built engine set amongst a beautiful backdrop. I wish it had been otherwise, as having roots in this 3000 year-old culture, at the least, I had hoped it to be a bit more civil.

Second stop-Guilin, famous for its karst limestone formations jutting from the rice patties winding through the Li River providing inspiration for Chinese painters over the centuries. Once again, another booming city with billboards, neon signs, bustling orderly traffic under overcast skies. We arrived at the train station to a scowling man with a dumpling pop belly stomach, hawking a giant phlegm to the side (an act fined by the authorities and printed in the local newspapers for public humiliation. A punishment deemed unthreatening to their phlegmatic extrusions). He screamed, "CHINESE DIE, AMERICANS DIE,TOO! (Mind you, this was our 2nd day in China.) A local guide/tout informed us of the reason for his comments. We had not read or seen the news in weeks. Huh? Spy planes? All is fair in love and war. Guilty? Our new-found-tout agreed with our apathy and recommended a nice new guesthouse, Happy Hotel in Yangshou, one of the few backpacker-friendly destinations.

Red is the color of celebration, white-death, and navy-the revolutionary spirit and gray is China's default state. Slate gray, cool gray, blue gray, black gray, misty gray-are the mountains, skies, rooftops, building walls, clothing, stone stares and overall psyche of the common people who have endured WWII, The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution just in the past 60 years. I had taken their sufferings into account, suppressing any judgment of their ill-behavior toward us, hui guo's(foreigners) until the end.

The red guards are approaching middle age and a national guilt combined with multigenerational regret over the destruction of thousands of years of art, philosophy and religion, flung out the window as if a sour plum wrapper would somehow surface. Once again it is we, "selfish, imperialist Americans, imposters of the world" who pose as a prime example of a nation and people worse off and therefore we should be resented and feared. And this was the prejudice we faced.

‘I AM NOT SITTING IN THE BACK OF THE BUS!’ We have heard this before, but not from an Irish American man. Whether its bad luck, bad strategic positioning, lower class, or car sickness, locals refuse the back seat, saving it (at double price) for hui guos. My partner, Brian Moran -AKA Rosa Parks goes to China. Rosa and I also experienced: cold shoulders, kicked out of hotels, last in line, last served meals, the worst rooms in guesthouses/beauty shop (brothel). I was not bothered so much by the fact that they were running their side business, as much as I disliked the prostitutes who were monopolizing the bathrooms and using the sink, as if it were the Mekong River to wash their clothes, vegetables and hair simultaneously. Like a local, I pushed my way to the faucet to brush my teeth.

Destination- Guanxi, one of the poorest provinces (but friendliest), offers the remains of traditional sod houses with tiled rooftops and wooden doors with red and gold banners reading, "long life", "prosperity" and "good luck". Within the narrow cobble stoned alleys, ancient faces with navy Mao caps stroll with hands clasped behind, looking back at you. Rows of men provide street services: acupuncture, cupping, shoe repair, ear cleaning, astrological readings and herbal medicine specializing in hemorrhoids as a result of a diet consisting of predominantly of bao zi and dumplings. Dai women with little emperors tied behind their backs with embroidered blankets, dress in shades of ocean blues with black headdresses, work in a construction zone of half built modern block buildings where groups of four sit around a table playing mahjong amongst the rubble. Fireworks explode in celebration of the "Sweeping of the Tombs" holiday when villagers visit their ancestors graves located within the rice patties and marble mountains.

Another town, another festival. Dali, Yunnan province, home to the Bai,Naxi and 260 other minority groups- a yellow wild west Siberia, notorious for its outlaws, outcasts and exiles. We arrive on time for the Dai festival of ancestor worship. Hundreds of minority people gather along the hillside singing prayers, playing bells and gongs, burning colored rice paper with ink written prayers and group into singing debates in which a couple takes turns at melodic jesting. Hoards of people squeeze to and fro throwing handfuls of rice to the down and out desolate: grotesque amputees, victims of elephantiasis, goiters, rickets, deformations, mental illness and other diseases of poverty. Always bits of hell in heaven, reminding you, you are on earth.

Exiting Lijiang, a once romantic provincial minority village transformed into an open air museum for group tourists in red and yellow baseball caps, Brian calmly looked at me and said matter of factly, ‘I'm going to punch him.’ The hotel clerk deserved a cultural shot for taking advantage of us hui guos, trying to profit on refusing to return our deposit. Making the daily average of $1 a day, it was worth it for him to at least try to bargain for our deposit without reason just like everyone else we had encountered with a monetary transaction attached.

There were no more straws left for it to be the last. When the bus driver with the bugged out eyes, clenched fists and growling teeth screamed at Brian to keep his luggage on his lap, we had already predicted his hot air. However, the tumbling luggage on the rack landing on top of Brian's head giving him minor whiplash did come as a surprise. We should have bought that travel insurance reminder came up again. We could only laugh when the man sitting next to us immediately jumped at the chance to put his luggage right back where the other bag had fallen. Afterall, this is a country where the Three Stooges dubbed in Chinese is a big hit.

The day ended on an unexpected humorous note. As we exited the bus, we looked behind and watched the bus give birth to a herd of goats. The shepard tossed his goats one by one out the back of the bus window. When each one landed on the asphalt on their heads, back and side, they each screamed out, baaaaa!

Within 5 hours we approached Zhongdian, 15,000 feet above sea level, home to the Naxi and Tibetan tribes. We walked toward our guesthouse, Tibet Hotel, only to be greeted by smiling happy villagers. (Now, that's more like it!) Coming from magical Tibet, this town may have seemed horrid with its modern constructions, shoving the few remaining houses representing indigenous architecture aside. But we had reached a point where smiling locals was a tourist attraction. Thus, we parked our bags in this little nothing to do town surrounded by snow peaked mountains.

Border towns are a big hit in my book. You are able to compare the transition in architecture, language, landscape, dress, food and in the faces. Tibet only being a hot, skip and a jump over the mountain range, Zhongdian offered snapshots of Shangri-la: yak heads mounted in front of restaurants lined with pieces of cured carcasses, prayer flags wrapped around stocks of wheat above mani stones, monks in burnt sienna robes one sleeve hanging down, groups of men of Peruvian faces with wide brimmed black fidoras, orange, turquoise, red carved windows in 2 story white walls interrupted by tall vertical beams, spinning of prayer wheels ending in a blessing by a high lama at the 17th century monastery established by the 5th Dali Lama. A dream I deserved in my travels of 5 weeks through South West China.

In the hotel with Wong Kar Wai, Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung, Gong Li and Bridgette Lin, I lied back and watched the punches and kicks and whirling in the air- The China I know and love.