10.28 寂寞 to 11.2 武当山

10.28

I found a village right across the street from 北大, where the ponds and streams have been dry for so long that walkways have been paved along the bottom. I traveled in a straight line alongside a tiger of a cat, who weaved his way through bike rakes and leapt atop obstacles in the path. I took pictures of the clothes hanging over spiky lawns. Nothing is sold within these gates, for once; life is only kept or given.

After that, I found the Chinatown of Beijing not too far away, where everything--mostly fruit--is sold. But modestly, and quietly, because only the locals, 本地人, come here. I was able to blend in for a while longer if I covered the flash of my watch. The smell of sweet potatoes was the closest thing to suffocation in this market. It could be a fragrant death among these people.

I see now that it's not the not being understood that makes studying abroad so lonely--because that feeling will pervade everywhere in the world at any time. Excluding the fact of family, I believe Hong Kong was not a lonely experience merely because I had real work to do, with real ramifications. here, it's just time, and schedules, and travel. If I can't justify that, I have no reason for being.

"He worked simply because there was work to do. It seems this kind is best." -The Ronin

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10.29: On Bargaining
You pay only exactly what you pay. THe full cost, in the end, is how much you are willing. Relative comparisons can never hold up because there is always cheaper, cheaper. You pay for the experience, you pay for the product, and you pay for the reflection. Buyer's remorse only comes from having excess to begin with.


SPIGOT - 北大 to a 华裔美国人 (for the English magazine here)
My experience of China has largely been a matter of family or a matter of crowds. Beida at night is both and neither at the same time. The campus here has a solidarity that appears most after dark, when people come out walking in slippers with shower baskets, when the stores begin to close and the canteens become quiet reflections.

The streetlamps cast tight shadows, and in places like the chuanr booth, one can stand with an idle sense of purpose, breathing mist, listening to the oil simmer. I watch the people carrying big jugs of hot water back to their rooms, and I can’t help but be enchanted by the simplicity of routine here: the earnestness of taking a walk for hot water from an old spigot, the homeliness of a television’s glow behind the fruit stand late at night. Even the fashion sense seems intended for warmth rather than trendiness.

In the stovepipe mini-market across from the Xuewu Canteen, where photocopiers are constantly at work, there is a woman who has set her bed down in what would be the front office near the entrance. This is not a luxurious position, and I’m sure the perspective is different from the inside rather than from my outsider’s view, but in such bare functionality this woman is probably living her life with more purpose and direction than a lot of the intellectuals I’ve known back home.

Maybe it’s just the charm of being in a different country and having that outsider’s perspective; maybe I’m just taken in by a society where, for once, I’m part of the majority ethnicity rather than the minority; or maybe I just haven’t spent enough time here yet to be disillusioned back into Western standards of living. Regardless of the reason, I know that when I take a short walk to tap hot water into my small flask, I notice the streaks of rust on the spigot, and it makes me feel more in touch with what it means to be alive in this world, and to be working for it. There is no idleness without meaning here.

There is much presence in this place; it is full of quietude and benediction. When the lights go out at night, whether we are dreaming or working or both or neither, we still drink from the same cup, and the stillness touches us all.

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10.30
On the 20-hr train to Wudang Mountain, the one spiritual destination I absolutely had to make while here. Already the experience is more real than the spoiled travels we have been going on. I'm on the top of three bunks with no door and a fly that's made a home of the air conditioner. Someone is smoking in this car. I'm anxious and a little excited about the non-Western toilet in the morning; I haven't been forced to squat in this country until now.

The train's stopped for a moment. At least here, at the platform, there is light outside the window, and people gathering within the scope of its shade. I'm hunched against the wall in a foldout seat in the hallway with some sort of military officer who's reading the newspaper. I hope someone notices my English writing and starts talking to me. I've never been good with showing my interest in people, familiar or stranger, in any language.

But by writing--and doing so in necessity, for once--I feel less lonely already. This train has set me free.

night window:
looking for landscape...
only reflections

I got a crappy, expensive, cold dinner at the dining car ten soppyw ashing rooms away. The waitress saw me reading Hemingway and exclaimed, "老人与海?!" She snatched it right from my hand when she gave me my food and sat in a spare seat, mumbling that she was too curious. She almost seemed disappointed it was in Chinese, though. Less exotic, I guess.

Back in my car, I found a handful of unoccupied seats near the middle. It's because of this one dude with a snore to drown out my cousin in Hawaii (who snored so loud one night that the sound of hiimself would wake him up at regular intervals). Also, the window's open to balance out the sound a bit; the compromise is the smell of shit that's been deposited all along these tracks.

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10.31
Morning. Still on the train. All farmland. I sit facing the back, watching as small people on large fields trail behind us. Almost always in pairs, either husband or wife tossing up handfuls of seeds from a basket like a blessing of grain.

There's a little girl in the hallway with a mass f pigtails. I still stand by the idea that Chinese is a much more expressive language than English, even for little kids. Their Beijing accents make them sound like a bubblegum brigade; it's not until they're older that the accent makes them sound like pirates.

When the SIM card text-messages me to say I'm in Hubei Province, I wake up and find the hall empty and silent. It's lonely again. The fields transform into lush gardens and backyard hills, in all manner of green, as we pass Gucheng. Now it begins to look like a martial arts novel. One village has its fields surrounding a big perfect square of a pond. Just off from the center of that is a small tree sticking out of the water.

Evening, at the Xuanwu Hotel, watching a Beijing Opera singing contest on CCTV. I'm so tired, and such an outsider, and so alone. This is the least familiar and also least touristy place I've been to in China. It's just a town at the bottom of the mountain, with story and history, but just a town. I walked along the main drag when the kids got out of school at 5. I saw teens hopping over the fence to practice their martial arts at the ruins of a big temple complex (but refrained myself, this time).

But i lost a day from my schedule because the Sunday train ticketsto Beijing were all sold out. I'm waking at 6 in the morning to make a mad dash up the mountain (no time to climb it myself as I had planned, or to spend a night at the time), and then rush back down again and head back to Beijing. I might never come back to this place, and I wouldn't mind returning later, except I already skipped a class to take the train out here to begin with, and our teachers have been taken advantage of more than enough by now. Sometimes gratitude and propriety are a greater cause than exploration; out here, I understand now what Sarah Witman meant six years ago when she told me that her greatest fear was being alone.

What is the cost of solidarity? What is the cost of companionship?

I almost feel like giving up and just hiding in this room with its extra bed and television. But I came this far; I ought to get a glimpse from the top of the mountain before I decide where to go next. I guess that's a metaphor for my black belt too.

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11.1
At the Wudang Train Station waiting to go home. Downstairs in the enormously empty room (no idea what it's used for, if the trains all stop upstairs) a dozen women in their early 30s filed in, synchronized, their arms raised in the air. Then the leader stepped out of the line and called out a moderate rhythm as they started a sort of Malaysian-looking dance. Bizarre, yes, but not with the same religious presence of the gray-haired old ladies we passed by in Suzhou at a parking lot after sunset: they danced very slowly, with tight joints and blank faces, to Muslim music playing on a boombox. Those are the moments I love about China and probably will never understand.

I missed sunrise on the mountain and missed sunset on the mountain, and skipped the free (送,用英文怎么说?) hotel breakfast to make it to the front gate early (and also didn't get to see the cute hotel receptionist who blushed when I didn't understand her yesterday). But those are the only things I've missed. I almost added not talking to the WGR [外国人] at the train station I had also seen on the mountains, but I just helped her out with some ticket stuff and it turns out she speaks German (whiel gesturing, and English to me) and is a pretty grumpy person.

On the train. This has been a real pilgrimage. I took the bus 3/4 of the way up, then took the cable cars to the Gold Peak (金顶), the walled temple which actually crowns the vertex. All along the railings up, people had bought little locks here with their names and dates engraved on them. I got the cheapest set, which say 情玄武当山,永结同心 on one side. The other side has my name on one, and 吴立芳
 on the other (which is bizarre; I have no idea what it means; maybe it's the name of the woman who engraved it, but that would be awkward considering these locks were in the shape of hearts). These are locks without keys, which hold memories atop this mountain and rust slowly with the flow of wind. I found the windiest spot and locked my set.

On the way back, I took a different route out of curiosity and ended up on a three-and-a-half-hour hike winding around the mountain, encountering temple after temple, instant-noodle stand after instant noodle stand. Oh, and souvenir shops galore, but not in an absurd "Look, white man, come here" sort of way. This is touristy, but in a local, Chinese way.

Along these verdant, empty paths, there was one 9-yr-old boy in a blue windbreaker standing with hands in pockets and half a dozen cucumbers (or some sort of green tubular vegetable) on a tarp before him, 3kuai each. Deep mountain territory, and entirely worth the trek. The world below doesn't even come to mind from up here, where the only view is the precipice of other mountains; home and the rest of civilization only exist in the mind.

But at one point, when I was the only person in sight or sound for as far as I could tell, and the "Danger for falling rocks" signs started coming, I realized how dangerous it actually was for me to come here alone. I imagined myself falling or getting trapped somewhere. No one would know how to find me and tell my family what happened. Moreover, my house--metaphorically speaking--was not in order. There are apologies I have not made yet, and wishes, and decisions I need to go through with before my path ends. The people who told me life gets better after teenagedom were very right; I have so much more 充实 and purpose now than when I was dark and melodramatic.

I don't like being alone when I don't know where I'm going, though. I guess nobody does, and that's why the whole world has been built upon language and community.

There was one kid standing behind a little wooden table, selling drinks and flipping through his primary-school textbooks, hands on his hips in a power-study stance. A little girl with four pigtails toddling down the One Hundred Step Ladder with two brown hard-boiled eggs, each bigger than her hands. Men with those little emperor sedans, carrying mostly the elderly from temple to temple for exorbitant prices. The four businessmen I followed for the first leg of the trip, who stopped every person we passed to ask how much longer the trip was and sighed at every inconsistent answer. The woman at the 飞-something-something table where my endless downhill descent became a baffling uphill climb, who sold me a bottle of water for 4kuai, and when I tried to get it for 3, she said something like, "Hey, man. I'm tired too; I'm the one who had to carry these things all the way up the mountain today!"

But most of all the wind. The moment this whole trip became worthwhile was when I sat int eh cable car for 20 minutes of nothing, and then the wind hit, and I saw fall leaves blowing down the mountainside like little crisps of sun. And immediately after that, a dragon-slip of fire flew in from around the bend, and curved its way right beside me. There was one spot where the wind kept poking through, and in that empty space I swear it formed a heart, and then a monk preaching.

That's my modest cloud tale for the day. It's 8:30. I'm going to sleep, and when I wake I'll talk to the girl in the bunk opposite mine.

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11.2
red sunrise
ball of teacup steam
smell of feet

I know some of the trouble happening with family back in the states, and there's nothing I can do about it, not even offer help or condolence without sounding trite. It's 8 in the morning and still 5 more hours on the train. Even then, the journey won't be over.

But I have no wishes. No place I'd rather be than laying on this tight, mildly clean bed, watching anonymous city boxes and farm patches through the window, the sunlight a dusty shade of day. Despite the discomforts and worries and unfulfilled thoughts, I'm at peace. I'm asleep and in motion, the best of both worlds for a while longer before the trip comes to an end.