CHINA: CHINA TO ME

 

Chris, Mom, Bill, Laurent, and me at the Leshan Giant Buddha in China's Sichuan Province, 1993

In 1993, when I was visiting my mom and Chris in Taiwan during my Christmas break from college, my mother told me that she and Chris were taking me on a two-week trip to southern China that included Kunming, Cheng Du, Emei, and Dali. And we were going with their good friends, Bill and Laurent, who were also American diplomats learning Chinese in Taipei. This was a big deal to me since I had an obsession with Chinese history. I was reading everything I could get my hands on about China at that time. 

I read about the mind-boggling changes China had gone through in the last century: the decline and end of the Manchu Dynasty, Western and imperial powers that took advantage of China's natural resources, the Japanese invasion, and the Kuomintang. I read how in 1949, Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China, had closed the country off to the outside world, and incited disastrous policies such as the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s that led to one of the worst famines in history. How Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to destroy all traces of foreign influences and its own cultural and historical origins - to wipe out the Old Fours - old customs, old habits, old culture, and old thinking. How he rid those in his own party of any capitalist-roaders and bolstered fanatical teenagers called the Red Guards, which terrorized the general population, killed, shamed, and victimized their elders and officials who had dedicated their lives to their country.  I read about Deng Xiaoping, and how China opened its doors once again to the West in the 1970s. I had also read about China's still pervasive bureaucracy under the communist regime. 

I couldn't wait to go. 

We touched down in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, with the song "Edel Vice" playing on the plane's intercom, and then entered the small airport where we were shoved into a crowded room full of passengers. In a fog of cigarette smoke, and rubbing shoulders with strangers, we waited while we could see in plain view the customs officials casually sipping tea like nobody's business until they finally decided that break time was over and the immigration process began. We all pushed and shoved our way through like cattle. Welcome to China!

Bill, Mom, me, Chris, and Laurent in front of our van that toured us around

I looked for examples of old China, the one I had been reading about. In a market in Kunming, we saw an old woman with bound feet. Footbinding ended with the establishment of the People's Republic of China, a practice that had, incredibly, gone on since the 10th century. The woman we saw in the market was the last of that era. In Chengdu, street vendors were selling all kinds of unimaginable things, including tiger penises. "Good for what ails you," they said. We passed by a local restaurant that someone told us specialized in serving large black river rats. One night, we strolled by an outdoor stage with Chinese opera performers dressed in elaborate costumes imitating the styles of the Ming Dynasty, their voices squeaky, high-pitched, and harsh sounding, but beautiful at the same time. Many of China's traditional customs and practices were re-emerging as communism loosened its grip. That same night, we ended up in a loud and crowded restaurant with rowdy men sitting at round tables who were crudely spitting chicken bones on the floor. The food was excellent but laced with a Sichuan pepper that numbed our mouths. Later on our trip, we went to a Chinese medicine shop where we were shown a medicine that the pharmacist said could clear your pimples and heal your sore throat. 

We were often reminded that we were still in a communist country. In one of the hotels we stayed at, Mom and Chris ran out of toilet paper, and when Chris asked the cleaning ladies for more they said, "We don't have anymore. Maybe we'll get some tomorrow?" 

Our tour guide "Benjamin" who spoke English with a British accent

Or when we took a twenty-four-hour train ride - in a government-operated train - from Kunming to Chengdu. Mom had insisted we travel by train. She thought it would be romantic. Our cabin was a "soft sleeper" compartment or first class, but it didn't matter since the train was filthy, especially the dining car - and don't get me started on the disgusting bathrooms - and the cigarette smoke was so thick it made our eyes water. The train attendants were surly, and the loudspeakers continuously blared a strange mixture of Chinese music, American pop-rock, and even the theme song to "Davey Crockett." This train ride inspired a novel my mother and I wrote several years later called "Hard Sleeper," a murder mystery set in 1930s Peking and Shanghai. 

But still, when the five of us ventured into the streets my traveling companions, who had all been to China in the 1980s, repeatedly said: "My things have changed!" 

Chris and me with Chinese ladies, on our travels through southern China, 1993

We saw evidence that Deng Xiaoping's economic reform was sweeping through China's major cities, and things were changing. Karaoke was set up on street corners, we saw publication stands that carried a variety of magazines, including nude magazines with graphic fold-outs. We also saw women wearing stiletto-heeled ankle boots and stretch pants, far different from the communist Mao suits - a unisex, plain, gray pantsuit that symbolized proletarian unity. In our hotel in Kunming, we had been greeted by a huge neon Santa and the words "Merry Christmas." Strange since it wasn't long ago that anyone displaying Western ideas was deemed a counter-revolutionary. When we went to restaurants we were seated with local patrons, instead of in a separate room for foreigners, like they had done in the past. In Dali, that guide books called "the new Katmandu," we found a small cozy bar called Marley's Bar that played Western music from the sixties and seventies, which was occupied by mostly young Western travelers smoking marijuana. 

Mao had been called the savior of China since he had unified the country after WWII, but some of the people were slowly beginning to understand that he was responsible for the deaths of millions. It was estimated that 70 million Chinese died under Mao's rule. Former Red Guards were ashamed of their past behavior and they were aware that the people had suffered terribly. And China was now joining the rest of the world, becoming a powerful and confusing mixture of communism and capitalism. Chris told me about Nixon's historic visit in 1972, ending the 25-year estrangement between the two countries. Nixon's visit led the way for China's opening up of the West. It was dubbed, "the week that changed the world."

Chris, Mom, me, and Bill in Marley's Bar in Dali

As a traveler, I don't want countries to change, I want them to be locked in time so I know they will always be there for me to go back to, but as a human being, I know it's imperative that places change. We all must evolve.

One of the books I read about China was called CHINA TO ME by Emily Hahn. It was about her life in Shanghai in the 1930s. She wrote how she loved Shanghai, but feared it would change. "Always changing, there are some things about it which never change, so that I will forever be able to know it when I come back," she wrote. "No, they can't take Shanghai away from me."

Our two-week trip through southern China was grueling. We were almost always cold. It was January and most of the hotels we stayed in didn't have heat. We'd ride in the van through the vast countryside for hours, sometimes ten hours in a day. We ate nothing but Chinese food, and it was unappetizing to eat rice and chicken for breakfast. Yet, I'm nostalgic for that trip. How Emily Hahn described Shanghai and her fear of it changing is how I think about the places I have traveled to throughout my life. If I were to go back now, it would be different. Maybe I wouldn't recognize it. 

To me, travel is not just to grab a glimpse of a fading era - but to see time move. Nothing stays the same. Places change, and the places I've been have changed me. 

Mom, Chris, Laurent, and me, Cheng Du 1993