As much as it is a mystery to me how the thighs can endure what they do in any given training session it is also a mystery to me how much the lungs can tolerate day after day living in China. The first two days here were gorgeous; clear blue sky with puffs of white clouds. The night sky, glorious, with so many stars overhead one could barely see the black sky for the brilliant twinkly shimmering. The third day the haze returned and it is thickening by the day. It creates an ironically beautiful effect on the sun, which looks red all day long. There is a smell and taste to the air too; an amalgam of coal and dust that creates a slight burn in the esophagus. Even though the spitting is really gross by our standards, this body’s natural defense makes complete sense when you are here.
Our team took a training break yesterday and visited an area a couple hours outside of the Village called Yun Taishan."Cloud Platform" Mountain is a beautiful area of this region; it is quite a large landscape, on the scale of Mt. Rainer to Chrystal Mountain. Throughout several jagged faced peaks reach up 10-14,000 feet. Their faces are composed of red and yellow sandstone, the lower layers of which are geologically millions of years old. There are networks of caves, muscular waterfalls and valleys populated with Reese’s monkeys. In a typical Chinese way it is a well-developed tourist site. There two levels of sprawling parking lots, each with hundreds of oversize tourist buses. One parks, unloads and then transfers to an inner mountain transit bus. That bus runs up several thousand feet to the beginning of the walking area. Everyone disembarks and joins the masses to explore this ancient mountain.
As you can imagine it is all about taking pictures. Walking through the tunnels or up the flights of carved in stairs is really an adventure in stopping and starting. There is no way to fight this or resist it; you simply have to fold yourself into the heap of humanity that is China. I don’t know why, I have been to China six times and have visited several different parts of the country, but every time I come here I am simply in awe of how many people there are. This mountain did have a certain order to the trekking flow but also not really. The walking lines frequently jammed up as young lovers and families took their time snapping pictures, creating human bottlenecks in the particularly narrow passages. One finally had to simply fight one’s way through this to keep some flow going; the old Chinese women were (and I find generally are) the most aggressive, shoving and elbowing past anyone in their way.
With every visit to China I am also reminded of the devastation of the natural environment. It apparently is the only possibility when so many people live in an exponentially expanding place with no real regulation that I can see. It is apparently the only possibility when a country allows itself to import pollution from its global neighbors. It is not just the Village or the Mountain but the overall developmental theme everywhere you are. By the time we left the Mountain region it was sunset and the 2-hour drive back was done mostly in the dark. The drive took place on a deeply pocked and rutted road whose driving surface was narrowed considerably due to the construction around it. Cranes, bulldozers and concrete mixers all lit by small floodlights were working full out along side the road the entire way. I was sure our mid-sized bus’s suspension was going to fail at any of the potholes; there was never one time over the two hours where our bodies were not bouncing up and down.
The dust created along this road was colossal. I became extremely claustrophobic at one point, my lungs struggling to find oxygen. I had to really calm myself down not to panic. At one point I simply realized there was nowhere to go. The road that I was on was one among hundreds of thousands of such roads in this gigantic country of growth. Travelling along it gave me unfortunate but complete insight into one of the primary sources of the thick blanket of haze that is surely seen from outer space. Combine this with coal-based power, no emissions standards, and sand from the eroded Mongolian Plateau – how could the sun not be red? I became a bit philosophical at that point as our bus flew down the road. The driver instinctively honked and veered his way in and out of traffic, kicking up along with his fellow drivers so much dust in the dark night that I was astonished he could see his way through the yellow plumbs.
I suspect the spatial awareness that creates old women shoving their way past people in a crowd is the same spatial awareness that creates the cacophony of driving patterns along these dust producing roads of China. Like the tourism lines I’m sure there is certain logic to this flow, but it is beyond me who grew up in a country of space and the EPA. Along side the tour busses and construction vehicles there are motorcycles and scooter and still the old broken down pedal powered bikes and three wheelers. One may think that texting and talking is bad in the US but when you see it here it’s logic has no place to sit inside your brain. And indeed, last night for the first time in my China travels, I saw the aftermath of an accident. The poor fellow, a motorcycle rider caught slightly out of sync from this mysterious and chaotic flow of traffic looked as though he didn’t stand a chance.
We were all hungry and exhausted by the time we pulled into Wenxian. Even the thought of eating another glorious meal there took back seat to my wish to simply be back in my dorm with a power bar watching Breaking Bad on my computer. The first restaurant was closed but Chen Zi Quan, who I now understand is not just a fighter but also a foodie, said he was taking us to another place for noodles. And then he gestured something that looked like antlers. We thought this meant we were going for venison but that was not quite it. We were going to a noodle place famous in the entire region for Donkey.
I have been asked if one can actually be a vegetarian here in China and one most certainly can though you would not know it by this trip. I’ve never had donkey before but I figured if I ate a chicken head I could certainly eat a donkey. And oh my I would eat it again. It was so delicious! We were served thick chunks of donkey that we dipped in some amazing garlic sauce; this dish along with some garlic spinach and a few “others” our first course was plenty of delight for me. And then the noodles were served! Fantastic! Thick hand pulled noodles swimming in a rich stunningly tasty broth with lots of garlic & cilantro. This time thin slices of donkey meat wove in between the many other layers of culinary enchantment.
I realize that telling these stories of poor sanitation, pollution, crowds, construction and odd foods may cause you to ask, “Now why does she go there again?” You might ask why, with all the hosting of these teachers right here in the comfort of her own home & beautiful school, would she subject her thighs and her lungs to this special kind of torment? Why indeed. I used to say after each trip that I will never come back to China, but I always did. And now I say I always will. For me the answer to why is simple: it is the Magic. Of course my Art lives here and my family of teachers live here but moreover I will always come back for the magic that is China. That undefined mysterious and utterly compelling magic that is woven into the fabric of this country like so many layers of noodle soup. There is magic woven in between the thick yellow haze of mass construction. There is magic woven amidst the overwhelming crowds and blaring traffic. And the magic I love the most is the magic I find woven between the thousands of years of rapidly evolving history.
Kim
Nice! I'm totally enjoying your postings.
There magic!
Posted by: Kevin | October 21, 2011 at 10:24 PM